High seas and low moments
GILBERT and Sullivan have never lacked for critics. No sooner was the cult under way than a philosopher, Frederic Harrison, complained that ‘the age which can tolerate cannot read Homer’. Nonetheless, I sped to English National Opera’s (ENO) revival at the Coliseum, partly in search of pleasure and partly because it’s directed by a cultural hero of mine, Cal McCrystal: the man who stages Giffords Circus, who was responsible for the comic business in the National’s and who did a superb for ENO in 2018. Does Mr McCrystal ever put a foot wrong? The answer, in Gilbertian terms, is hardly ever.
