WS Gilbert feared that Patience, his satire on the Aesthetic movement embodied by Oscar Wilde, would date fast. He needn’t have worried.

Aestheticism had a broad following: Wilde was in the first-night audience at the operetta’s Savoy opening, while Whistler was a friend of Gilbert. Foppish and narcissistic as its more extreme practitioners were seen to be, they caught the zeitgeist.

So long as vanity, affectation and poseurs are with us, Patience will have its targets. Indeed, in the electronic age, fad-following has arguably become more fetishised than ever.

Martin Duncan’s traditional but lively semi-staging made no attempt to update the action but hilarious new life was injected into it by a fine team of singing-actors. In the role of Reginald Bunthorne, the central Wilde figure, Simon Butteriss drew on a vocal range from effeminate falsetto to cod-macho roar in his efforts to woo the ladies.

His rival, Archibald Grosvenor, was played by Toby Stafford-Allen, possessed of an admirable baritone deployed with exemplary diction. The rendering of their Act 2 duet, each bent on out‑mincing the other, was priceless. Proceedings were temporarily halted by the laughter greeting Butteriss’s line “I must not allow myself to be unmanned”, as Stafford-Allen, face at crotch level, clutched him by the waist.

Also outstanding as the redoubtable but ageing Lady Jane was Felicity Palmer. Her delivery of such lines as “My charms are ripe” was inimitable. Rebecca Bottone was the perky Patience.

Donald Maxwell, Graeme Danby and Bonaventura Bottone were excellent as the dragoons (the stiff-necked military are lampooned as mercilessly as the aesthetes), while Robert Tear made a cameo appearance as the Solicitor.

The ENO Chorus was in terrific form and Charles Mackerras, conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra, brought a Rossini-like sparkle to Sullivan’s score.
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