Rhondda Rips It Up!
Riverfront Theatre, Newport/Touring

WELSH National Opera are celebrating the centenary of partial women’s suffrage with this new work by composer Elena Langer and librettist Emma Jenkins, whose focus is Margaret Haig Thomas — Viscountess Rhondda — the activist secretary of the Newport branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union.

Her imprisonment for arson and her experience as a passenger on the doomed liner Lusitania is not necessarily a subject for comedy — and this is very much a Gilbert and Sullivan-style light operetta with a flavour of upper-class life at the time of a serious campaign for women’s rights —  but director Caroline Clegg has a deft touch. She's produced a light-hearted comic romp through the early feminist life of the redoubtable viscountess, who's acted and sung with aplomb by Madeleine Shaw.

The deft humour and typical musical-hall slapstick and filthy innuendo is led by soprano superstar Lesley Garrett, superb as the MC. She's mistress of the naughty glance and wink, none more so when singing the risque Harry Roy song My Girl’s Pussy.