Gilbert and Sullivan
Going native
Geoffrey Smith
The last few years have been the best and worst of times for Gilbert and Sullivan — worst for devotees of the operas a la D'Oyly Carte, best for the thousands who learned to loathe G&S through school productions, unstoppably enthusiastic parents and those unchanging Cartesian performances. The demise of the authorised versions has left the field open to a healthy crop of novel interpretations, some of them dubious, but all of them equipped to promote a Gilbert and Sulli- van renaissance. Those who dismissed the Savoy series as of a piece with compulsory sports and school dinners are being sur- prised by what is, effectively, a new theat- rical partnership.
The most noted iconoclasts have been colonial: Joseph Papp's utterly New York production of The Pirates of Penzance, with its disco atmosphere, manic choreography and general flavour of West Side Story-come-to-Cornwall, and this win- ter's Mikado from Stratford, Ontario, which was less outrageous but equally bright and bouncy. Over the last year and a half, however, a British response to such challenges has been gathering momentum, in the work of the New Sadler's Wells Opera Company. So far they have pre- sented a sparkling Mikado and a useful Gondoliers. To these they have now added a triumphant HMS Pinafore. All three works are being given in a repertory
season, which serves notice that, as it were, the G&S Ashes have been returned to Britain.
Whatever their excesses, the New World productions injected energy, pace and im- agination into a moribund tradition. Those qualities were vital to Gilbert's original conception, but equally important was his infallible instinct for what was uniquely and hilariously British. Christopher Ren- shaw's innovative direction with the NSWO conveys not only great zest, but a sense of native style that illuminates the operas afresh. In The Mikado, for inst- ance, Nanki-poo, as played by Christopher Gillet, is pure Bertie Wooster, an amiable wet who says 'Gosh!' , wears a boater and rides a bike. He is perfectly matched by Yum-Yum and her chums, who are a mixture of Betjeman and Sloane Ranger with a touch of St Trinian's. HMS Pina- fore's spectrum of accents embodies with deadly precision the opera's comic ana- tomy of class. Nicholas Grace's brilliant Sir Joseph Porter is afflicted with that curious lockjaw that compels senior naval officers to speak without a trace of facial move- ment, while Captain Corcoran (Gordon Sandison) is an upper-middle-class hearty who greets his crew in a bathrobe, does a callisthenic or two, then settles down with the Times crossword.
The effect of these daring, discerning touches is quite remarkable. Audiences that have certainly heard Gilbert's lines before react as if they were newly minted. His humour, which has often seemed hopelessly Victorian, pompous and arch, suddenly works. One laughs out of delight, not filial piety, and can imagine how a first night at the Savoy must have felt.
The NWSO's achievement, in fact, seems an act of homage to Gilbert. For years — generations, almost — it has been habitual to credit Sullivan with the operas' longevity. But Gilbert was the driving force behind their creation, as librettist, director and designer. Christopher Ren- shaw has simply made full use of the resources implicit in each work, investing them with the same sort of attention and wit that Sir William did. Like Gilbert's own, Tim Goodchild's sets and costumes combine realism, opulence and fancy. The stage is always charming to look at, and the bits of prop 'business' are apt and funny: one large Japanese vase, on rollers, serves as a repository for Pish-Tush, a pedestal for Pooh-Bah and a trysting place for Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum.
That kind of ingenuity is a director's province, and Renshaw is consistently in- genious without overdoing it. He never (well, hardly ever) fiddles with the text. He has obviously read the operas with care and a twinkling eye, and many of his happiest strokes derive from an inspired fidelity. An offstage whistle signals the entrance of The Mikado's schoolgirls in a twee locomotive and three carriages quite justifiably, since Gilbert has them singing 'Comes a train of little ladies . . Since Pinafore's Little Buttercup says she
has gipsy blood, why not present her as more minx than matron, given to sudden, jerking fits of prophecy?
Though Renshaw's productions rehabili- tate Gilbert, they do not neglect Sullivan. His warm, spritely music is beautifully played and sung, sometimes so well, as with Joan Davies's Katisha, that the effect is genuinely operatic. However, it is kept in its place, an eminent aspect of the whole but not its raison d'etre. Unquestionably, G&S are once more full partners.
This first Savoy repertory season since D'Oyly Carte is laudable both for what it is and what it augurs. We may hope that Christopher Renshaw and the NWSO car- ry on their very good works until the whole G&S canon is available. For a foretaste of the pleasure that prospect brings, Savoyards new and old, lapsed and poten- tial, should proceed at once to the Wells.
Geoffrey Smith's book The Savoy Operas: a New Guide to Gilbert and Sullivan (Robert Hale f10.95) was published in 1983-
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