I’ve never seen a Gilbert & Sullivan opera before. Great fun and brilliantly staged. I managed to get to the pre-show talk this time, where I learned that it satirised “transpontine melodrama” – and, here, the bridge was the one over the Thames. So “south of the river” has a long reputation for being infra dig.

Even by the standards of opera, the characters were caricatures. The only moment of real feeling (besides mirth) was in a pretty, sentimental duet – “There grew a little flower” – between an elderly maiden and a ghost. I came out still humming the bridesmaids’ song.

• Sir Ruthven – Dominic Sedgwick
• Rose Maybud – Amy Freston
• Richard Dauntless – Xavier Hetherington

I mistimed this one. I knew nothing about the opera before I went – not even the composer (Britten) – and was going to rely on the pre-show talk to fill me in. So I prepared to set off for the 6 p.m. start of the talk . . . and discovered that it had started at 5 p.m. The opera itself started at 6 p.m.

So I went in unprepared. Not that it mattered – and, besides, we’d “done” the play in school (O-level perhaps) and some lines, memorised for exams, called back to me across the decades. The early start, I’m guessing, was for the sake of the slightly creepy fairies – average age 10, working hard on a school night.

It was good. Unusual choices (Oberon was written for a counter-tenor, the wood was represented by sheets of perspex) and a sixties setting. The music introduced me to tone painting and started eerily. Non-singing Puck was very good – shades of Gollum or even Mutley – but somehow the sense of the physical world reflecting fairy discord was lacking.

I liked the thought that its premier was in the Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh. La Scala, eat your heart out.

• Oberon – James Laing
• Tytania – Daisy Brown