ABSTRACT
IN the season which was to embrace the 150th anniversary of Arthur Sullivan’s birth, 13 May 1992, the English National Opera played its non-Japanese Mikado, first staged in 1986. Jonathan Miller as director and Stefanos Lazaridis as stage designer had set the action in an all-white London hotel foyer in the 1920s, where guests and staff apparently enacted – as a joyous, self-contained celebration – the operetta itself. The dance-steps were those of the Charleston, and no more than token mock-Japanese comic gestures, such as an indication of narrow-slit eyes, were occasionally made.
