Berwick Festival Opera 2019: Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance

Berwick Festival Opera’s latest fully staged co-production of a classic Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera is their hilariously full-blown assault on Romance and Melodrama The Pirates of Penzance.

Set amongst a daring yet strangely tender-hearted band of Cornish smugglers, this re-orchestration by Matthew Rooke is given an extra dose of theatrical flamboyance with a staging that’s been lovingly updated to the 1970s.

Our dashing young hero Frederic is a time-served apprentice to a band of smugglers, itching to explore the world and find true love… Just as he’s about to set out on his new life, he encounters a dazzling group of lovely young girls - and their zealous guardian, the Major General. Love at first sight, unravelling family secrets, struggling authority figures, and things never going quite to plan – all wrapped up in a ridiculously entertaining package of silliness, sentiment and song.

Arguably their most popular work, and with a host of thoughtfully drawn characters, it’s packed with familiar songs including I am a Pirate King, Poor Wand’ring One, With Catlike Tread and the tour de force of all their comic patter songs (and the most parodied for its rapid-fire delivery of ever more preposterous rhymes) I am the very model of a modern Major General…