While Leeds-based company Opera North regularly obliges by touring productions of the operas everyone knows (even if they don’t know they know them) they do like to intersperse these with the odd left field surprise. This season, the quirky, less familiar choice was Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Ruddigore”. Even when the delicious absurdity of such comic musical soufflés was taking Victorian audiences by storm, this was never the most popular of the Savoy operas. Bad timing, perhaps – in 1887 it came immediately after the immense success of “The Mikado”, an impossible act to follow. The music almost got serious in parts (actually some of Sullivan’s best) and Gilbert’s wittily dark plot included a witch’s curse, madness, ghosts and characters with names like Despard and Ruthven… Yes, you’ve got it – they had actually created a proto-Goth opera (only with catchy tunes)! G&S lightly pluck at the themes of doom, death and love from beyond the grave in a gloriously ridiculous tale set (for reasons unclear) in a Cornish fishing village, and re-set in this production to just after WWI.  With a cursed hero who can brood and sing simultaneously, an aged retainer (splendidly and sonorously sung by Henry Waddington) and a song that apparently insulted the French, what’s possibly not to like? Given that it starts with a bevy of professional bridesmaids complaining that nobody is getting married and peaks with the spectacular scene of “The Ghost’s High Noon”, where an entire gallery of ancestral portraits step down from their frames to sing enthusiastically about the joys of night life in the graveyard, it’s clear that this is an ensemble piece requiring great chorus work. The principal players, though, were well up to the tricky task of combining flawless vocal delivery with an apparently effortless capacity to swirl capes, dance hornpipes, and generally find the funny in Gilbert’s verbal humour. Special kudos to Helen Evora for playing Mad Margaret to the hilt, and to Xavier Hetherington for being the jauntiest jolly Jack Tar imaginable.

Gail-Nina Anderson