When the humour genes were being handed out, I missed the one that makes British people of a certain age laugh uproariously at the Victorian jokes in Gilbert and Sullivan. I sit there stony faced while nearly everyone around me dissolves into laughter at the toothless satire. So maybe D'Oyly Carte's production of The Pirates of Penzance, directed by Stuart Maunder and first seen here in 1998, will find more sympathy elsewhere.
We like to think that period performance is a recent phenomenon, a product of the last 30 years of the 20th century, but that overlooks the D'Oyly Carte company, which has been staging these Savoy operas in much the same way for well over a century. Though Roger Kirk's leafy designs suggest a rainforest and a Mayan temple more than a secluded Cornish beach and a crumbling stately pile, the production is otherwise ordinary, two-dimensional stuff. Even Gilbert and Sullivan might have thought it pretty staid.
Everything is sanitised. The pirates have standard-issue pirate costumes (shouldn't they be just a bit grubby?); the Major-General's daughters wear chaste white dresses; the action is equally bland. One longed for a bit of healthy smut - goodness knows, with all those swords and truncheons being waved about there's the scope for it. But G&S fans know what they like, and D'Oyly Carte just go on giving it to them.
Musically, too, it could be a lot better. Sullivan's music is full of catchy tunes and sly parodies of his European contemporaries, as well as occasional discursions into much darker, deeper musical worlds (just where does the act one chorus "Hail Poetry" come from?). That doesn't make it easy to sing or play however. Under John Owen Edwards the orchestra sounded tentative on Tuesday, and the cast is a mixed bag, to say the least. Royce Mills delivers the Major-General's patter song with regulation adroitness and Gareth Jones is a witty Sergeant of Police, but otherwise the best voices are to be found among the women. The soprano of Charlotte Page as Mabel shines out; she has a musicality and sense of style that is too often lacking elsewhere.
• Until June 16. Box office: 020-7836 8888
