It's easy to sneer at The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan's most popular Savoy opera, with its infamous mix of orientalist stereotype, imperialist swagger and music hall wit. The brilliance of Jonathan Miller's evergreen production for English National Opera, revived by David Ritch, is that it undercuts any sense of self-satisfaction, allowing the piece to have a social conscience without diluting the charm of Gilbert's drama and Sullivan's effortless music.
Set in a court of 1920s decadence, the star-crossed lovers of Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum - played with relentless cheeriness by Bonaventura Bottone and Jeni Bern - are snared in the grip of the Mikado's corrupt Japan and the lecherous machinations set in motion by Richard Suart's odious Ko-Ko. Ian Caddy's Pooh-Bah is the bureaucratic instrument of the Mikado's brutal regime, in which flirting is a capital offence.
The production sends up every element of the drama: Bottone plays Nanki-Poo as a gormless, grinning stooge who would rather kill himself than live without Yum-Yum. The Mikado himself, sung by Richard Angas in a fat-suit, treats the executions as post-prandial pleasures. The show plays up its satire of Pooh-Bah's political pomposity and turns Ko-Ko's first-act aria into a skit on contemporary bêtes noires, announcing Tony Blair, Des O'Connor, and Raymond Gubbay as candidates for a justified beheading.
But the real success of this show is that it is a theatrical delight. Its star is Frances McCafferty's vengeful Katisha, the elderly aristocrat rejected by Nanki-Poo. Her first-act entrance is a moment of impeccably staged farce, as she descends on to the lovers' celebrations, determined to foil their plans. She may be the equivalent of the pantomime dame, but she creates the show's only moment of emotional intensity. After the delicious campness of every other scene in the show, McCafferty's solo number in the second act, lamenting her life of loneliness, is genuinely touching, and is accompanied with clarity and sensitivity by Gareth Jones and the ENO orchestra.
· In rep until May 6. Box office: 020-7632 8300.
