Meeting Mike Leigh

I hoped, but hardly dared to believe, that one of my great heroes would show up for a pre-performance talk in which I was participating at English National Opera. Mike Leigh's film work has been carved into the consciousness of (most of) my generation, at least in the UK. It even seems from what my goddaughter Rosie May told me that a whole new fanbase is popping up among students for the evergreen Abigail's Party many years after Alison Steadman's Bev first tottered around serving up 1970s party snacks and asking a male guest flirtatiously 'Do you like Demis [Roussos]?': Rosie had heard of a production in which the cast drank in 'real time' so they really were pissed as the show wore on, and she'd seen it onstage elsewhere.

Since then, as well as having a good laugh, I've been touched at various levels by Nuts in May, High Hopes, Naked, Life is Sweet, Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake - and the surprise hit of Leigh's biopic on Gilbert and Sullivan at the time of staging The Mikado, Topsy-Turvy. The stage work less so. I thought Mr Turner was a total masterpiece - DVD review here - and I'd put it up there with Des hommes et des dieux (about the French monks in Algeria kidnapped and murdered by terrorists) and La grande bellezza, Paolo Sorrentino's ambiguous hymn to Rome as one of the three films I've seen over the past five years to have had the greatest impact.All three I imagine I could see again and again.

News that ENO had hooked Leigh to direct The Pirates of Penzance (production photos here by Tristram Kenton; talk snaps by Charlotte van Berckel from ENO's technical department) made me nervous. Would it work? It did, and I felt relieved to be able to praise it very genuinely on The Arts Desk, though maybe you have to be in sympathy with the razor-sharp G&S idiom and how that might most sympathetically be served to 'get' it. Like it or not - I loved it and laughed very loud very often - there was no doubt that time and effort had been put into every move, every grouping. Much surer-footed throughout, in short, than Terry Gilliam's Berlioz, though that had flashes of genius.

The work that had gone into a very polished show with a superlative cast (above, the wondrous Claudia Boyle as Mabel with Jonathan Lemalu as the Chief of Police and his deadpan men) became the more apparent following Mike's arrival the other Wednesday, five minutes before we were due to start, for the talk (by the way, the likely choice had been staff director Elaine Tyler-Hall, which would have meant a necessary woman in the group. But you can't sniff at the company that did materialise).

Christopher Cook, the absolute doyen of animateurs in my opinion and pictured on the right in the top shot, had mapped out a format familiar to these well-planned 45-minute events, which he always steers to perfection: he'd ask me questions for 10 or so minutes about the background and the music, then turn to Mike about the show, then the cover Major-General, Adrian Powter (top shot left), accompanied by vital repetiteur Chris Hopkins, would sing the patter song (Andrew Shore as Stanley Mark One with Joshua Bloom's equally impressive Pirate King pictured here),

and finally there'd be a general discussion and questions. But Mike took control, not at all in an unpleasant way, the minute he arrived, and decided it would be interactive from the start. It was impressive if slightly scary to see his stage management, but reassuring to see how he gave everyone credit (nice nod to the pianist, for example, and no sense of exclusive ego, though you've got to have one well adjusted to the world to do what he does).

So we batted the ball to and fro, I loved every minute, and you can hear the results on this podcast.

After the official business was over, we carried on chatting enthusiastically about G&S shows we'd seen going back some way, what we'd liked and what we hadn't (you'll hear on the podcast how it was a Finborough Theatre production of The Grand Duke which made that ML's first choice for ENO - but he couldn't get the collaborators he wanted to be equally enthusiastic). Needless to say, I'm going back to the ENO Pirates before the end of the run.

And while it's All About Me, and Great British Opera/operetta, here's the film Garsington finally released of the Death in Venice insight evening with Steuart Bedford and Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks. The Gondoliers it ain't, though I love Britten and G&S equally. You could say that the Savoy operas are tied to my childhood, Britten to my very slow coming out starting in my late teens.

A masterclass in titwillow'ry

Richard Suart (pictured above with Anne-Marie Owens in the first of Chris Christodoulou's images for English National Opera reproduced here) slipped in to the Jonathan Miller Mikado under the presumably small feet of Bill Oddie back in 1988, two years after its first airing. Which of course makes this classic of the operatic world a veteran production at 25 - I've written about this at length in the programme and on The Arts Desk - and though there were one or two things which could still have been brought into tighter focus when I saw the revival last night, Suart's Lord High Executioner is certainly not among them; custom has not staled his infinite comic variety.

Credit for a couple of the gags - Ko-Ko licking the Mikado's shoes, pure Monty Python, and, having been pressed to Katisha's ample bosom, spitting out a couple of her pearls - seems to have originated with the first Lord of the Chopper, Eric Idle. But I'm guessing Suart has built on the part in many ways since those two December '88 performances. Of course his ever-adapted little list is now a sacred and still hilarious rite (the audience applauded Berlusconi's 'bunga bunga' and a last-minute reference to the equally unfunny pronouncements of John Galliano last night). I can only say yet again that Suart's book on the subject in conjunction with A S H Smyth, They'd none of 'em be missed, is a delight from cover to cover and beautifully produced. But I did reel in admiration not just at the Lewis Carroll absudity of Gilbert's lyrics for the ballad of tit-willow - imagine a bird suffering from cold perspiration and a rather tough worm in his little inside - but also the new creativity brought to it last night.


It's treated as a cautious exercise in winning over the Margaret Dumontish Katisha (Owens, it has to be admitted, had some difficulty in manoeuvring her ample mezzo around the text and being heard, though my friend Clare's young son, who loved Trovatore at Covent Garden, observed that she was surely the only singer on the stage capable of 'doing dark and heavier opera'. Well, Donald Maxwell, the Pooh-Bah, used to sing Wozzeck, but that was some time ago). In a stroke of genius, when the 'echo arose from the suicide's grave', it's Owens who sings the 'tit willow'. She's hooked at last, and Suart's hitherto abject Ko-Ko waxes Pythonsequely confident.

It was such fun being part of the 45 minute whistlestop Join the Conversation Live event expertly guided as ever by Christopher Cook up in the Coli's balcony bar (yes, we've moved from the wacky set-up in the noisy Apple Store - scroll down to read about the last event I participated in there. CC actually asked me then about Parsifal, and I said that though I know it well, I'd actually rather talk about The Mikado). I was there loftily to draw comparisons between Sullivan and Puccini: 'The sun whose rays' is as much of a mostly-pentatonic master-aria as Liu's 'Signore, ascolta'). And you could have knocked me down with a horse-feather when my fellow panellist, Michael Simkins, told me he'd played Pish-Tush in Mike Leigh's masterpiece of let's-put-on-a-show thespian shenanigans Topsy-Turvy (time to get it on DVD and watch it even more carefully).


So Mike's achievement quite casts my junior efforts as Sir Joseph Porter and my endlessly recycled Nightmare-Song party trick in the shade. Even so I was quite amused, touched even, listening back to my patter of 1973 with the army of recorders and cellos (the only 'serious' instrument taught at Banstead Junior School) as accompaniment.

We also had a tasty appetiser from the Pish-Tush of the evening, William Robert Allenby, covering Ko-Ko and delivering for us the little list as originally set by Sullivan. He was allowed to make much of his relatively small role in the show itself, and I thought it was jolly nice of him after the talk to address my friend's two children, who of course had a whale of a time, especially with the special-guest wigmakers (Allenby explained that he was the only person on stage with his own hair, cut into Bertie Woosterish style by a lady of the wardrobe). Everything still looks dazzlingly beautiful in its crazy way, and it's a long time since I've heard an audience applaud a stage tableau, as they did when the curtain went up on the braiding of the raven hair at the start of Act 2.


By the way, the dressing-room board of pictures the staff brought with them to the talk included a droll composite picture of Felicity Palmer playing Margaret Dumont to Groucho Marx. Yesterday I took delivery of the Bell Telephone Hour potted Mikado of 1960 starring the great Groucho - Ko-Ko to glorious former Isolde Helen Traubel's Katisha (God, that woman was a marvel, from her 1930s Wagner Wesendonck Lieder with Stokowski through to a genuinely funny duet with Jimmy Durante in the 1950s as well as this). Their scene together is one highlight; Stanley Holloway's drolly low-key Pooh-Bah is another. The abridgement can be frustrating, but it's a curiosity well worth having.


Anyway, what a timeless work of genius The Mikado still is: I don't think there's a single line of dialogue which doesn't really fit today, even if a few need footnoting. Remember I grew up knowing most of this by heart, and it really was as fabulous a verbal education as going on to learn Latin or Greek. Not every singer is a natural at the spoken word in this revival, though all sing very well indeed: Donald Maxwell's Scots dignitary Pooh-Bah doesn't quite get the laughs in the right places, and though Alfie Boe moves well, he slightly gabbles his lines. But he makes a spiffing, gormless foil for Sophie Bevan's hard-as-nails Yum-Yum - really excellent in the dialogue, consummate as she has to be in her little ray of sun- and moon-shine - and they dance well, too.


You'd have thought Richard Angas's Mikado was a hundred now, but he too puts across the text with charm, and I love the slightly furtive delivery of 'My object all sublime'.


Conductor Peter Robinson handles the lovely woodwind solos well but could move it all along a bit more zingingly, a la Mackerras. Even so, the dancing is huuuge fun and the gags still work. This is a show ENO simply won't be able to replace, and although it seems to me that Miller quickly fell into wish-I-was-back-in-the-world-of-medicine diffidence, his Mikado and Rigoletto remain testaments to a once-sharp sense of luxuriant imaginative detail.

I put up this documentary on the making of the original show at the foot of the Arts Desk incarnation of the programme article, but there's certainly no harm in having it to hand here. Dig those 80s fashions...