Opera
High C's Rodney Milnes.
Both the Victorians and the 'other Victorians' took sex far too seriously for it to be tolerated as a subject fit for comedy, and this was the greatest single disadvantage under which composers of British light opera had to labour. Offenbach and Strauss lavished their musical genius on class and sex jokes, while poor Sullivan, their equal in inspiration, had to be content with class alone. Within this limitation, he was lucky to work with W. S. Gilbert, whose class satire was as vicious as any offered by European librettists, a fact compromised by the now age-old tradition of drawing teeth that bite with the pincers of period cosiness.
Sullivan's early pieces, that is those written before the successful set formula became a substitute for invention, combine musical exuberance with the sharpest of ears for the ridiculousness of operatic convention — they are, quite literally, 'comic' operas — and HMS Pinafore is one of the best. The potential of these works remains largely unrealised; even Tyrone Guthrie's 1961 versions were little more than D'Oyly Carte writ large. But Kent Opera's new production of Pinafore, which opened at Canterbury last week, comes nearer than any other I have seen to matching the crisp savagery of the text, which has the lot: Queen Victoria's desperately middle-class jumped-up office boy of a first sea lord, the babyswopping contralto who is first cousin to Azucena, the heroine torn, as so many operatic heroines were, are and ever shall be, between heart's dictates and social position, and the love-sick tenor who turns out to be other than what he thinks he is — and all this to the fizzing sherbet of Sullivan's musical numbers and some of the funniest cod recitative ever written.
This production, which can be seen in the Tunbridge Wells Assembly Rooms on December 14 and 15 and probably at Croydon in the spring, is extremely strongly cast and neatly directed by Glyndebourne staff-man Adrian Slack, whose neat and taut production belies his name. He has also worked on the Welsh National's
Billy Budd, a fact made obvious
by the set and the activities of the crew at curtain rise. I never thought I should live to see the
day when I sat through three encores of the show's hit number
with ever-increasing pleasure, and this is tribute enough to his skill and invention.
The comedy honours are shared between Enid Hartle's entran cingly Yorkshire Little Bootercoop ("Ha! That name! Remorse! Remorse!" she hoots in a hilarious Verdian aside) and Thomas Lawlor's fish-eyed, fixed-grinned first sea lord, a role that gains irhmeasurably with the absence of traditional camp. Nigel Douglas catches exactly the right of element of self-parody in the tenor role, and as the love-torn heroine Janet Gail combines a sly sense of the ridiculous with robust vocal forces, flinging out high C's dn, if you will forgive a pun too ghastly even for Gilbert, the high seas.
John Cameron, no less, is the stock operatic villajn, and Robert
Bateman a stylish declasse captain. All cope capably with the wicked Stimmungsbrechung of the text.
The cost of this distinguished
cast probably accounts for some skimping on the costumes for the sisters, cousins and aunts who, in Mr Slack's reading, are no such thing but merely the first lord's mobile harem — but you can't have everything. You do have precise and well balanced orchestral playing and in Roger Norrington a conductor who is aware of, and therefore able to make the most of, every joke in the score.
Previous page
