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 The Theatreguide.London Review

H. M. S. Pinafore
Union Theatre  Autumn 2013

In addition to running one of London's most ambitious fringe theatres, Sasha Regan has carved out a niche for herself as director of sparkling all-male productions of Gilbert & Sullivan. Pinafore may not be quite in the very top rank of her work, but that still leaves it a lot more fun than almost anything else around. 

Regan knows three absolutely essential things. First, that to play around with a classic you must love and respect it. Her productions are first and foremost excellent Gilbert & Sullivan, and any additional fun she can add through the all-male casting isn't allowed to overshadow the original. 

Her second insight is that in order to sing or dance comically you must first be able to sing or dance well, and she casts her shows with first-class young performers. Hers is not the easy school-show gag of guys galumphing about in drag – her performers can play convincingly as females and sing as beautifully as sopranos as they do as baritones. 

And finally, Regan is wise enough to know that a certain degree of camp is inevitable in her cross-gender casting, and that to try to suppress it would be as foolish as overdoing it. What makes Pinafore and her other G&S productions such delights is that she gilds the lily just enough. 

Of course it helps that G&S were already playing around with operetta conventions, making comic use of the silly romances and obligatory male and female choruses of the genre. 

When the male chorus enters declaring its maleness ('We sail the ocean blue') and the female chorus their femaleness ('We are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts'), the fact that here they're the same guys just singing an octave higher seems somehow right. 

Pinafore is the one about the sailor who loves his captain's daughter, who is too far above his station until it is discovered that he is actually . . . . 

More to the point, it's the one with 'I'm called Little Buttercup' and 'Never mind the why and wherefore' and the song about never never being sick at sea and the one about how 'in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations' he is an Englishman and the one about how to become the ruler of the Queen's nay-vee. In short, a typical Gilbert and Sullivan mix of clever comic songs and the occasional lovely ballad. 

Director Regan and choreographer Lizzi Gee have inventive fun with both the source material and the opportunities afforded by the casting. The male chorus numbers are all built on callisthenics, amusingly emphasising the masculinity the same singer-dancers will soon counter with small symbolic changes in costume and just a bit of mincing. 

There's a cleverly choreographed number in the near-dark, and Regan and Gee repeatedly work inventive and entertaining bits of staging around a single piece of rope. 

Tom Senior is appropriately stalwart and manly as romantic lead Ralph and Bex Roberts sweetly winsome as his Josephine while Benjamin Vivian-Jones makes an admirable Captain. 

And I've left this for last because it's of interest only to those who have seen and loved Sasha Regan's previous forays into G&S: what keeps this one from being quite as delightful? Occasionally, and only occasionally, dialogue scenes or musical numbers lack the snap, the heightened reality and artificial stylisation the form wants, as if the director, in fear of camping it up too far, didn't go quite far enough. 

You might not notice it – it's just the passing moment of dropped energy – and it would be a big mistake to miss this evening of fun just because the director has done it slightly more successfully before.

Gerald Berkowitz

Review -  HMS Pinafore - Union Theatre 2013