HMS Pinafore strikes a chord (From Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard)

HMS Pinafore strikes a chord

THE sign of a good musical show is when the audience come out of the theatre still humming the tunes and this was certainly true of the Carl Rosa company's production of Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham last week.

Not that it's hard to hum the Pinafore ditties as so many of them are familiar, from We Sail the Ocean Blue and Dear Little Buttercup to When I was a Boy and To Be an Englishman.

But this was a particularly well put together production, directed by none other than actor Timothy West, with Colin Baker as Sir Joseph Porter KCB.

He was very ably supported by Steven Page as Captain Corcoran, Anne Bourne as the Captain's daughter Josephine, Stephen Brown as the love struck Ralph Rackshaw, Patricia Leonard as Little Buttercup and the rest of the cast.

It's easy to see how the theatre-going public lapped up Gilbert & Sullivan when they first took the Victorian stage by storm, but listening to Gilbert's words, both spoken and sung, it isn't surprising that Sullivan was given a title and he wasn't.

His condemnation of the snobbery of the English must have come as quite a shock to the nation on which the sun never set and where everyone was expected to know their place.