Star rating: **** Though it took the Carl Rosa company a week to get into its stride, here at last was the real thing, a new Gilbert and Sullivan production that actually looked new and sounded new, which its two predecessors in Edinburgh disappointingly didn't.
It was not that Patience is a better piece than Iolanthe or The Yeomen of the Guard, though it is certainly one of the best and - if unmutilated - one of the funniest of the G&S canon. It was just that each number showed the touch of a masterly stylist and wizard of operatic parody whose every inspiration was seized by the singers, by their resourceful director and designer Peter Mulloy and their adroit conductor whose identity (Martin Handley?) remained unconfirmed by the programme book.
What, on previous evenings, had seemed a tired old company going through tired old motions was suddenly revitalised, reminding us how inspirational the Savoy operas continue to be and how their idiosyncracies, a century later, could influence the world of Monty Python, as Darren Fox's Duke of Dunstable so comically exemplified.
As a lampoon of Oscar Wilde - fortuitously coinciding with a production of The Importance of Being Earnest elsewhere in Edinburgh - the performance scored all its points, from its chorus of swooning maidens to Jill Pert's grotesque contralto soliloquy with cello in Act Two. Though leaving such riches to the end of an otherwise queasy week seemed a pity, this production will surely have the long run which, on current evidence, it deserves.
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