A Dunedin theatre company is completing a world-first series performing every Gilbert and Sullivan play in order.
The Really Authentic Gilbert and Sullivan Performance Trust opens the final comic opera written by the duo, The Grand Duke, on Saturday night at the Mayfair Theatre.
The play will be the last in an 11-year series, which has for the first time recreated the 13 operas in the sequence they were first presented in the late 1800s.
Director Hilary Norris says the series is a momentous achievement which Dunedin people are going to miss enormously once it's finished.
Though The Grand Duke has a reputation for not being the pair's best work, Ms Norris says audiences will be surprised by how clever it is.
