Written for Time Out
Gilbert and Sullivan's fairytale fits Wilton's Music Hall like a glass slipper, thanks to Sasha Regan's impish all-male production. Like the building itself, it puts a contemporary spin on something classically twee. With arched eyebrows, knowing nods and a gloss of high camp, the whole thing is as intoxicating and mischievous as moonshine.
Not that this is a simple spoof, however. The production, which sold out at the Union Theatre before transferring here, is founded on affection and attention, without which it would be both mean-spirited and cheap.
As in Propeller's all-male 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', the aesthetic is dusty attic chic, and Jean Gray's inventive costumes are gorgeously eclectic. Bunting, net curtains and badminton nets make fairy-wings; hockey sticks and umbrellas make canes.
Framed as the post-curfew play of a group of schoolboy explorers well met by torchlight, this 'Iolanthe' ripples with illicit pleasure. Even if she opts not to fully grapple with the sexual politics within, Regan's fairyland is like a chaste Molly House, its puritanical regime enforced by Alex Weatherhill's priggish Fairy Queen.
Accompanied by a single piano, this isn't the most pristinely handled of scores, but it is made beautifully strange by male falsettos, particularly Christopher Shinn's eponymous fairy and Alan Richardson's hysterical Phyllis.
What it lacks in finesse, Regan's Iolanthe more than makes up for with raucous irreverence.
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