Salad Days, Riverside Studios

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," trilled critic Harold Hobson in Wordsworthian mood about a musical which even in 1954 must have made Gilbert and Sullivan look like Ingmar Bergman. Over half a century on, can Salad Days's sweetly silly paradise be regained?

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," trilled critic Harold Hobson in Wordsworthian mood about a musical which even in 1954 must have made Gilbert and Sullivan look like Ingmar Bergman. Over half a century on, can Salad Days's sweetly silly paradise be regained? The fact that my eyes pricked as the two lovers launched into the dance-song celebrating their magic piano may partly be ascribed to nostalgia for teenage am-dram - late Seventies, not early Fifties - but much more to the airy lack of irony in Tête à Tête [3]'s deliciously classical production.