Review: The Mikado***

This year Scarborough's annual August cricket festival arrives early in town, with this celebrated version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, directed and adapted by Chris Monks. While the G&S was only ever ostensibly set in Japan – Gilbert did minimal research before penning the script – how could it possibly transfer from the feudal Far East to what is very clearly an English cricket club?

Transfer it did – the story and the show, which toured out of the New Vic theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme to become a hit at other venues.

Monks's idea is that the town of Titipu becomes Titipu Cricket Club and it is easy to see why Monks was so inspired to set the story here. An arcane society with its own bizarre set of rules, regulations and social etiquette – the MCC ties on display are hardly necessary for the audience to perform the imaginary leap to accept this story could be set on a cricket pitch. The copy of Wisden which is brandished as a law book is a fitting exclamation mark for us to spot the similarities.

The cricket theme provides fun before the play opens, with an elderly and very decrepit groundsman, a familiar figure to anyone ever connected with a local cricket club. The chirping birds, the team in their whites, this is an idyllic setting. There are some fantastic set pieces where the cricket pitch surroundings provide the perfect joke – stumps are used as a beheading platform, turned into a gravestone cross. In the overlong first half there are moments when the action drags, but that is made up for by an extremely energetic second half.

To Sept 4