In this screenplay, Mike Leigh-director of Secrets and Lies-brings Gilbert and Sullivan and fin de sicle London to life

W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were the most astonishing partnership in the history of musical entertainment, and in Mike Leigh's first historical film-as well as his first film to use famous characters from an earlier era-their lives and times are fully, richly explored. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, all things Japanese enjoyed an unexpected vogue in London society. This was not lost on the celebrated duo of Gilbert and Sullivan, who promptly set to work on The Mikado. Leigh's film presents the trials and tribulations they encountered in bringing their best-loved operetta to the London stage. It re-creates the lost grandeur of Victorian London and its great palaces of entertainment: a city of swirling fog and sputtering gaslights, of horse-drawn carriages and their irascible cabbies, of the newly rich, the nobility, the clubmen and courtiers, the Gaiety Girls and their stage-door Johnnies. Known not only for his acclaimed films, including Secrets and Lies, Naked, and High Hopes, but also for his unusual working method whereby his films are created through improvisation with the actors, Leigh has extended his considerable range still further in this extraordinarily vibrant new work.

20 Black-and-White Photographs