The strait-laced image of Gilbert & Sullivan was spectacularly unravelled in an intoxicatingly trippy swirl of colour and free lurve at the Radlett Centre last week.

Quintessentially Victorian and a huge hit when written in 1881, Patience is not often staged these days as it's considered by some to be somewhat passé.

A satire made famous by Oscar Wilde featuring poets, love sick maidens and a dopey dairy maid; it's a piece which today is often the preserve of the G&S aficionado.

Updating any G&S is potentially perilous but watching this flower power Patience was a truly mind altering experience.

Using a team of eloquent wordsmiths to add 60s references to the lyrics, Val Penketh and Helen Marshall put together an intelligent, energetic and genuinely funny show.

Complete with tanks, hippy garb and dancing à la Pans People, the psychedelic ladies gyrated in a lazy, hazy throng as they declared their love for Bunthorne and Grosvenor, the poets who had transmogrified into 60s rockstars.

Despite first rate principal performances from Gareth Edwards, whose rich tones brought warmth to the obliviously narcissistic Grosvenor and Debbie Ellis as a comical, sitar strumming Lady Jane, it was the strong singing and precision timing of the men's chorus that stole the show.

Led by David Marshall, Bill Penketh and the dewy voiced Edward Cross, their collective tongues were firmly in cheek all night whilst David Marshall exhibited machine gun like rapidity and accuracy with his cleverly penned solo.

A real theatrical head rush which left me buzzing.

Michael Moore