Bayham Abbey, Saturday 5 August 2017

Just when it looked as though Saturday evening might be a wash-out the sun came through, the sky cleared and picnicking could begin at Bayham Abbey before the start of that evening’s Mikado. The event was part of this year’s Lamberhurst Festival and was by Opera Anywhere who specialise in small scale touring productions but do not skimp on musical quality. All the voices we heard were appropriate and well-focused, and the accompaniment, based around Nia Williams at the piano, included solo strings and wind. Amplification was inevitably in use but was sensitively balanced to maintain an illusion of natural voices. That the singers could probably have carried without amplification was clear when the schoolgirls entered from the back of the seating area and could easily be heard though they were far from the stage itself.

Director Miles Horner’s approach was comfortably conventional, allowing the familiar narrative to unfold without any unnecessary attempts to add additional jokes or to update Gilbert’s lyrics – with the obvious exception of Ko-Ko’s little list which ranged from cold calling to Donald Trump. Mike Woodward gave us an idiosyncratic Ko-Ko, the voice alarmingly like Ambridge’s bad boy Matt Crawford. I did wonder for a moment whether the whole production was not a nightmare in the mind of Linda Snell!

One of the finest moments was very much unplanned. At the start of Act2 Yum-Yum, Nadia Eide Storrs in fine voice, had just launched into The sun whose rays when a formation of geese languidly flew across the twilight. It was a magical moment, but capped soon after when she was able to sing the second verse directly to the full moon which hung above us. How often can a Yum-Yum do that?

David Menezes gave us a lyrical Nanki-Poo and David Jones, a late substitute, a suitably cynical Pooh-Bah. Miles Horner doubled Pish-Tush with the Mikado. Vanessa Woodward brought a sense of reserve to Katisha, rather than the more conventional blood-thirsty harridan, but one sensed there was no bright future even after Tit-willow.

The choral parts were taken by members of the company and it is one of the advantages of amplification that four voices can sound like a much greater force when they come from speakers all around you.

While a significant number of the audience drew their chairs closer to the stage, many remained at their picnic tables to enjoy the ambience of the abbey and the mist which rolled in across the fields as the moon rose. About as close to an English idyll as one could wish.