Given that his previous work has been balanced largely on the cutting edge of hard, human reality, Mike Leigh's latest choice of subject is a mighty surprise.

Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan were light entertainment's kings of kitsch in the late 19th century, turning out ludicrously plotted but richly costumed operettas surprising as much for their popularity as for their intricacy.

Though their work is as much performed now as then, their street credibility outside Harrogate and Hampstead is not what it was. Leigh, in Bradford last week, went on record as wanting to change that, and the Hollywood ballyhoo currently surrounding his film of their lives will do his cause no harm at all.

Actually, beneath the costumes and mannerisms of Victorian London, Topsy-Turvy is not as untypical as it appears of the director of Secrets and Lies and Abigail's Party. Leigh is concerned not only with the music of Gilbert and Sullivan but also with their relationships - both with each other and their respective others.

The film opens in January 1884, as the curtain goes up on Princess Ida at Richard D'Oyly Carte's Savoy Theatre. Sullivan leaps from his sick bed to conduct the orchestra personally, but his immaculate and splendidly-sideburned presence cannot save the show.

The next morning, the critic of The Times sounds the death knell. "The story is a dull one," he complains, adding that the lyricist Gilbert has now become "the king of topsy-turvydom". Sir Arthur (Gilbert remains plain 'Mr' until much later) takes it badly.

"I can't waste any more time on these trivialities," he complains to D'Oyly Carte, resolving instead to visit Europe for a rest cure and then turn his attention to something "more grand".

D'Oyly Carte is a benign man, but Gilbert and Sullivan's shows are his meal ticket, and he cannot countenance any breaching of their contractual obligation to provide him with further material.

Salvation comes in the form of a Japanese exhibition in London - almost a real-life Mikado, without the music - which inspires Gilbert to write the Mikado itself.

"This isn't grand opera in Milan," he tells his assembled chorus, "merely low burlesque at a small theatre on the banks of the Thames."

The preparation for the new show provides Leigh with much character ammunition, as the cast members overcome their individual neuroses and buckle down to the job in hand.

But it is the director's eye for detail which places the cherry on the icing of this elaborate and extremely entertaining confection.

He is fascinated, for instance, with the very limited facility of starched Victorian gentlemen to embrace new-fangled items such as the telephone, the fountain pen and the sugar lump ("Whatever will they think of next?") His performers, customarily improvising as they go, bring immense depth to the proceedings: Jim Broadbent is twitchy and self-doubting as Gilbert; Allan Corduner effusive, in a Terry-Thomas sort of way, as Sullivan.

The show is stolen, however, (and stealing from Jim Broadbent is well nigh impossible) by Timothy Spall as the effete opera singer Richard Temple. "It's just too cru-el," he wails, as Gilbert cuts his solo number from the show on the eve of first night, prompting a mild-mannered revolt among the ladies and gentlemen of the chorus.

The Mikado, as the world's amateur operatic companies will attest, is a big hit, and Gilbert and Sullivan's working relationship is happily if tempestuously restored.

Gilbert's self-doubt, however, is harder to heal. Visiting the separate bed chamber of his wife Kitty (Lesley Manville), he bemoans: "There is something intensely disappointing about success."

In the case of Topsy-Turvy, I happily report, there is not.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.