Setting the stage
RELEASED IN 1999, Topsy-Turvy was completely unlike anything Mike Leigh had made before. Leigh’s first six films were set resolutely in the modern, real world — unvarnished, frankly lit and entirely without frippery. His first period drama, Topsy-Turvy was about a whole world of frippery. Set in 1884, in London’s Savoy Theatre, it tells the colourful story of musical legends Gilbert and Sullivan as they weather a potential split to create one of their biggest hits, The Mikado . More than that, it’s a salute to the eccentrics of the theatre world. Their vanities, their passions, their secret insecurities.
Its huge success set Leigh on a path to becoming one of the greats of period film. In , and last year’s magnificent , he depicted the past not as a perfectly preserved theme park of pristine costumes and gilded manors, but somewhere as real and mucky as the world outside your window. None of those films would exist without . To mark the film’s addition to the Criterion Collection, Leigh looks back
