Last year, Mike Leigh's film Topsy-Turvy did a welcome job of laying to rest a common perception of Gilbert and Sullivan: that they are the kind of thing your grandmother listens to in her nursing home.

Leigh can rest assured that the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park is carrying on his good work, with an exuberant production of one of Gilbert and Sullivan's very best comic operas. The plight of poor Frederic, the duty-bound 21 year-old who quits the eponymous Pirates of Penzance only to have to rejoin them, has tickled theatregoers since the opera first opened in London 120 years ago. The Open Air Theatre have found a perfect (and very fetching) Frederic in Mark Umbers, an actor whose speaking voice delights and whose singing voice delights doubly. Only a Victorian librettist could create a hero who tells his comrades calmly that he must exterminate them on the morrow, but Umbers is so earnest when he says it that one can't help but go along with it.

Frederic is trapped between the conflicting interests of three parties: the famous pirates with whom he has adventured for most of his life, the gaggle of chaste beauties that those pirates desire to wed, and a cowardly constabulary. At first sight Regent's Park's circular open-air stage, arched by a ship's prow and circumscribed by a representation of the sea, seems ample to contain the action of the show. But once the actors begin to bound around upon it, it seems barely able to contain them.

It is no surprise, then, when the cast periodically storm the audience and chase one another around the auditorium. The pirates are most energetic of all, leaping and swaggering frenetically whenever the opportunity presents itself - the production's Pirate King, in the form of Jimmy Johnston, is particularly athletic. The manic energy of the production is due not exclusively to the direction and choreography, but also to the fact that it uses a Broadway version of the show already reputed for its madcap character.

Anachronisms abound in this show that would make the moustache of the staunch Savoyard twitch. But whereas in a lesser production these would seem gimmicky, director Ian Talbot has mastered the art of presenting them in a deadpan context. Frederic lapses unexpectedly into an Elvis impression, General Stanley's daughters lapse into disturbingly modern exhibitions of passion, and the orchestra has a disconcerting habit of adopting a cabaret-style swing in its step. Because these nudges to the audience are so sudden and isolated, they amplify the comedy without undermining the narrative. The lesson here is that no gag is too cheap, provided that it is played straight.

When it comes to playing straight, the most crucial member of the cast is of course Major-General Stanley, whose indignation and sense of tradition is the institutional counterpart to Frederic's more genuine sense of honour. Paul Bradley, better known to fans of the soap opera EastEnders as bumbling video shop stalwart Nigel, musters all of the bluster that the part requires and more besides. This production will remind you why the mustachioed Major-General, who can 'write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform' but cannot 'tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin,' remains one of Gilbert and Sullivan's most popular characters.

When Gilbert and Sullivan succeeds in eliciting laughter and delight today, rather than just being the province of pedantic devotees, it is interesting to consider just what is being laughed at. According to HM Walbrook, in his Gilbert and Sullivan Opera: A History and a Comment, The Pirates of Penzance satirised four principal targets in 1880:

1 - the snobbery of the nouveau riche in the person of Major-General Stanley;
2 - the shallowness of the pose of 'respectability'
3 - the exhibition of an over-mature feminine sentimentality; and
4 - in terms of the broadest comicality, the conscientious solemnity of the police constabulary.

On the basis of this analysis, one can reach two conclusions about the contemporary appeal of Gilbert and Sullivan, both of which have a grain of truth in them.

An ungenerous conclusion is that the satire of Gilbert and Sullivan has been rendered meaningless by the antiquity of its assumptions. 'The snobbery of the nouveau riche' is now indistinguishable from general Victorian bluster, 'over-mature feminine sentimentality' is now indistinguishable from general Victorian quaintness, and attacks on respectability and police solemnity are now fair game. Whereas a Victorian audience would have laughed at the audacity of satirising respectability, today we laugh because the satire is executed with such a velvet glove. According to this line of thought, Gilbert and Sullivan have become a toothless punch and judy show.

But a more generous conclusion is that Gilbert and Sullivan anticipated our contemporary perspective on the Victorian era, in the very act of working within it. Far from being an outdated satire of Victorian society, their work is as legitimate a transmission of that society to us as any other. When a world based on over-elaborate notions of rank and honour is presented at its most ridiculous, we are given a self-conscious version of that world that has a claim to immortality. The physical comedy and irreverent puns of a production such as the Open Air Theatre's wrap comfortably around the libretto and the music, because the libretto and the music are sufficiently timeless to accommodate them.

As the reader might have guessed, I prefer the more generous conclusion. And if this production is anything to go by, audiences will be laughing at The Pirates of Penzance in Regent's Park in another 120 years' time.

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