THERE IT IS, an unwritten law: critics, keep your claws off amateurs. All it means is that there's no call to kill the joy they get - even if they don't always give - out of exhibiting themselves before an audience. In this instance, however, let me make it clear that I came unasked. No, it wasn't out of curiosity, but from an irresistible urge to revive rosy memories and some rollicking scenes of schooldays. For what carnival is to Latins, hula-hula to Hawaians, Gilbert & Sullivan is - or was - to Anglo-Saxons - a gentle, genteel way of jumping out of their skins. So I was going, but not going to write about it, at any rate, nothing nasty. All I'm really after, I told myself, is one last, lingering look, a private peep into paradise lost.

I CAME AWAY, that determination quite undone. Logon's Gondoliers proved to be by no means just another abortive attempt on the part of amateurs, but a production no one could gloss over.

IN HIS epic poem, The Voyage to Gaza, Ed Codish embarks on a less light-hearted but no less hilarious trip up a waterway in a wadi (Jerusalem Post, March 28). Instead of Codish's lovely white-wood sloop, Logon launches a black gondola in a blue canal in what the programme notes style (a successor to the Dead-Med Canal Project."

In other words, old-time Venice vanquishes the Negev.

It does so in a spectrum of accents ranging from Romanian and Hungarian, through sabra, South African, North American to Glaswegian in a virtual kibbutz galuyot, an ingathering of the exiles.

As always in the Savoy Operas, the story is in the lightest vein of satire and fantastic farce, located in the most nebulous of never-never lands, populated by the most improbable of grandees, grand priests, and gondoliers, grazias, not forgetting an amorous triumvirate of competing incompetents complete with covetous consorts, who press their claims ona not quite credible crown.

Nonsense with a satirical but sanguine twist, for in the end the right guy gets the right girl, and cloud-cuckoo land the zany ruler it deserves. With the undercurrent gentle parody, the overt theme is marriage, a resolution that presents couples innocent of coupling, in tongu-in-cheek Victorian style.

The execution? Refreshing, buoyed up with enthusiasm, irresistible free of commercial concern, high-spirited, infectiously funny - the polite cliches appropriate to any amateur production all apply. But in order to rouse the audience -

that included at least one cold-hearted critic - to the rapturous applause it did in Tel Aviv, there had to be much more: and was.

FIRST THE principals, a number of them past professionals who, having changed their calling with their country, still mustered old skills and accomplishments with undiminished panache.

Especially enchanting were Amiel Schotz's divertingly dead-pan Grand Inquisitor, Maxine Ray's just as grand and also gamey Duchess, and her devil of a Duke, Harvey Narrol.

Two Rinat Choir singers, Nancy Naggan and Ronit Yalon-Downs , gave great renderings of Gianetta and Casilda, together with Mary Hannah Klontz's kittenish Tessa. Adi Adar was an astonishing Marco, Ed Spitz an amusing Giuseppe.

Director Tamara Vardin-Mutal maneuvering an immense cast (16, not counting the chorus), on Beit Hahayal's mini-stage, achieved maximum brisk-to-buoyant impact. As to diction and delivery, the level was what one would wish for but rarely hears on any Hebrew stage.

And then the music. Without trampling on the toes of the music critics, whose proper province this is, I hope I can safely say that Eri Doron's musical direction was not only sensitive, it was in

the true D'Oyly Carte tradition. The choral work, despite a dearth of male voices, was as good as the best - to my mind.

All in all, on the musical as well as theatrical side, it was rightfully awared the Edis de Phillipe Prize for its contribution to opera in Israel.

Talking of D'Oyly Carte, I heard the cast whisper after the grand finale, "Where's Fruma?" "Look out for her," they said, "an old lady leaning on a cane."

Another afficionado with a backlash of nostalgia like my own? Nothing of the sort. Fruma, it soon transpired, is the genuine article, a surviving member of the original D'Oyly Carte company. Where but here in Israel would you expect her to show up?

Let's all look out for her, then, next year, for a next year there is bound to be, if the necessary funds are forthcoming. With a bit more backing, this phenomenon, artistic, social and cross-cultural, that Logon has floated all across the Negev as far up as Tel Aviv, is surely here to stay.