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Grange Park's other offering brought no such inhibitions. At times it felt that the prodigiously talented David Pountney, directing, had rather tossed off this reading of Anything Goes - some sequences seemed stilted, undirected, unadventurous and unimaginative. But in Pountney's take as a whole there was plenty of buzz; the best jokes rarely got wasted.

Anything Goes is Cole Porter's response to America on a new high : it followed hard on the Roosevelt 1933 recovery, and even allows itself -- and gets away with -- a clutch of bad taste jokes about those driven to desperation and suicide by the slump and events surrounding it ('I was just coming out of the Stock Exchange when he took off from that ledge'). Set on a cruise liner (Kurt Weill and Ivor Novello likewise wrote hits set on board), peopled by a bunch of winos, hoodlums and dandys, it packs a superb punch, usually to the brisk click of (appropriately) one-liners.

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