HMS PINAFORE
Theatre at the Tabard
★★★★★
“small-scale theatre at its very best: warm, witty, and quietly extraordinary”
The Tabard’s H.M.S. Pinafore, a follow-up from the same creative team behind last season’s much-loved Mikado, is the rarest of theatrical conjuring tricks: a production so thoroughly delightful you forget it has no orchestra, no ensemble of dozens, and a notable absence of rigging, given its setting on a Royal Navy warship. For all its ultra-low budget limitations, this production is not merely charming. It is enchanting.
Director Keith Strachan corrals Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1878 satire on class, love and social hierarchy into an intimate ninety-six-seat space with a confidence that borders on cheek. Captain Corcoran’s daughter Josephine (played by Stevie Jennings-Adams) is in love with the humble sailor Ralph Rackstraw (Finan McKinney). Her father (Leopold Benedict) has grander designs, in the form of Sir Joseph Porter, First Lord of the Admiralty (John Griffiths). A harbour trader with her secret of mistaken identities does the rest.
The standout is Gloria Acquaah-Harrison’s Little Buttercup. Warm and mischievous, she gives the dockside vendor a rich emotional centre that anchors every scene she touches. With the plot hinging on her secret, Acquaah-Harrison provides both glint and genuine feeling.
Equally remarkable is Marissa Landy as Cousin Hebe. When she is not delivering tart comic timing in the chorus, she picks up a flute to provide half the score, and at one point breaks into a tap routine with such joy that the audience cheered. To sing, dance and play in one performance is graft elevated to high art. Kieran Wynn’s Bosun and Ryan Erikson Downey as Dick Deadeye round out the company with cheerful aplomb.
The sublime score is carried by Landy’s flute and Musical Director Annemarie Lewis Thomas at the piano. Sullivan’s tunes emerge as bright and shapely as ever.
Gilbert and Sullivan was always meant for rooms like this. In Victorian times the score travelled the Empire in sheet music, sung by families round the parlour piano and in British clubs from Calcutta to Cape Town. This production sits squarely in that tradition. It is conventional, too, to tweak the lyrics to the moment; here the music itself has been gently rearranged for the company’s gifts, with doo-wop renderings of old favourites. The entire evening was a delight.
What the production lacks in budget it more than answers in invention. There is a particularly clever moment during “He Is an Englishman” when the audience waves Union Jacks, while the cast brandish flags reflecting their own heritage, for example a Scot raises the Saltire. Watching it, I understood for the first time the irony of how the high-Victorian expressions of patriotism that Gilbert lampooned in 1878 inspired the nationalisms that undid the empire. From the first rumblings of Irish Home Rule in the 1880s to the long road that led, eventually, to Sir Muhammad Iqbal and the idea of a separate state for India’s Muslims, it was the British who showed them how to do it. Patriotism, it turns out, is contagious.
This is small-scale theatre at its very best: warm, witty, and quietly extraordinary.
HMS PINAFORE
Theatre at the Tabard
Reviewed on 7th May 2026
by Elizabeth Botsford
Photography by Matt Hunter
