Come one, come all: come to the camp of pleasure! The year is 1790 and the setting is an elegant villa outside London, where an assortment of colourful characters enjoy good company, good humour and (of course) music. The price of admittance to Pleasure’s Encampment is a ‘probationary song’, and Charles Dibdin’s The Wags presents some 15 of them, all composed by Dibdin himself and linked by humorous monologues to create what we’d now call a one-man revue. Dibdin called it a ‘Table Entertainment’, and he acted and sang the entire show himself, to piano accompaniment.

The wordplay is nimble, the characters are just lively enough to transcend stereotype (there’s a Brigadier Bumper, a scientist called Mr Pry, and O’Gig – ‘a true thundering Irishman’), and Dibdin’s songs have a fresh-cut melodious simplicity that’s often infectious. They range from the nonsensical (an ‘Indian Death Song’, supposedly translated from the Peruvian) to the sentimental (‘The Soldier’s Adieu’), and the best of them have a satirical bite that prefigures Gilbert, if not exactly Sullivan. The opera snob in O’Gig’s ‘Irish Italian Song’ – with his pretentious Italian jargon and insistence that ‘all English music’s a vile bore’ – is instantly recognisable, even in 2021.

For Retrospect Opera, David Chandler has recreated a shortened version of The Wags (Dibdin adapted his show to each audience, swapping songs and improvising fresh dialogue), and the result is performed here by Simon Butteriss, a Savoyard sans pareil who makes Dibdin’s droll circumlocutions slip down like hot buttered rum. His singing is in proportion, with Stephen Higgins’s piano (they use an 1801 Broadwood) adding a gamey period flavour. The only caveat is that the acoustic occasionally blurs the text – however, there’s a full libretto, as well as comprehensive booklet notes. In company as entertaining as this, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a thoroughly agreeable time.