Covent Garden preaches inclusiveness while practising segregation. As a patron of the new Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House, I was firmly told that the Floral Hall and Amphitheatre bar were no-go areas. This nonsense must stop at once. A customer at the National Theatre's Cottesloe, to take an exact parallel, is not prevented from drinking at the Olivier. Barring one from the main building also gives the impression that the studio is a derisory appendage for which one has to use the tradesmen's entrance.
Actually, the Linbury Studio is a delight: a rectangular, functional, courtyard theatre similar to the building, perfect for lectures, recitals and small-scale operas. It also offers an ideal home for this enjoyable National Youth Music Theatre show based on Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. The relationship between stage and auditorium is excellent. The seven-strong band is placed behind the singers. The one thing that shocked me was seeing that the young cast was amplified with microphones stuck behind their right ears, like tubular fags.
The show works well, however, for a number of reasons. One is that She Stoops, although written by an Irishman, has a quirky Englishness that perfectly suits Howard Goodall's composing talent. While his contemporaries pitch for the mid-Atlantic market, Goodall melodically evokes the English choral tradition: his big romantic number is here even scored for piano and trumpet. Charles Hart's book also capitalises on the play's peculiarly English dilemma - a hero whose sexual inhibitions are released only by his social inferiors - and his lyrics are sharp and witty. At one point we are told of the roguish Tony Lumpkin, equally addicted to gambling and to Bet Bouncer, that "these are not the only bets he's laid".
The production by Russell Labey and Jeremy James Taylor has one or two strokes of needless vulgarity - joky signs printed across people's bottoms, for instance. But Peter Rice's sets are an elegant delight and the cast, as you might expect, has the untarnished bloom of youth. Quite outstanding is Sheridan Smith who was a wonderfully pert Little Red Riding Hood in the Donmar's Into the Woods and who here lends Mrs Hardcastle rouged cheeks and a bossy imperiousness undermined by her groping lechery: she is the brightest talent to have emerged from Doncaster since Diana Rigg. The whole show has a freshness and vitality that reminds you of the long-gone days when musicals were fun rather than an assault-course on the senses.
Until January 5. Box office: 0171-304 4000
