Preview Gilbert & Sullivan: Ruddigore
Pre-structuralist melodramatic iconoclasm can still be a jolly good laugh
Preview: Gilbert & Sullivan: Ruddigore
Other Recent Preview Articles
“We could change it to Kensington Gore,” observed W S Gilbert after the original title Ruddygore was declared too much like cursing for 19th-century sensibilities. Yet the minimal tweak to make it acceptable shows just how fine-tuned was his thinking when deciding what he could get away with.
Ruddigore carried on the successful run of Savoy Operas that made its authors the pre-eminent collaborators of Victorian theatre. Since they were consummate showmen with concern as much for the publicity off-stage as the spectacle on-, Gilbert and Sullivan would doubtless have denied that their work was formulaic, but here are all the necessary ingredients - characters either too good or too bad not to be caricatured, irregular distortions of humour, the witty games with words and ever-fresh ingenious tunes - to construct a barely-feasibly coherent story from staggeringly absurd building blocks and still create a work of equal dramatic and musical merit.
The dramatis personae are the usual harmlessly entertaining, perfectly solid lunatics: a criminal aristocrat and his faithful retainer, the village damsel easily won, a foster-brother engaged to pursue a love suit who falls for the lady himself, the humble farmer eventually found to be of noble line, professional bridesmaids ready for duty ‘every day from 10 to four’, a wild girl (who perhaps has an excuse to be a lunatic) and ancestral ghosts (who have no excuse for being solid at all). As a contemporary critic noted, Gilbert turns the moral absolutes of melodrama upside down. Social norms and expected human behaviour invert before our eyes: the constant become fickle, the naïve become calculating, the once-bad, now made good, fall for the once-mad, now made sane, and a dark age-old dynastic burden is lifted by a moment’s enlightened reflection. HMS Pinafore held up the navy to ridicule, Patience was a skit upon over-elevated æsthetics, and the craze for all things Japanese became the comic target of The Mikado. Ruddigore sets melodrama itself in its withering sights and, as always with G & S, humour proves the finest medium of all for a put-down.
Opera North’s meticulous dedication to musicals and operetta means there is nothing of the ‘B’ list in their casting. The part of Rose Maybud is taken by Amy Freston from the recently-acclaimed Cosi. Australian baritone, Grant Doyle, from 2009’s Paradise Moscow, sings Robin Oakapple and the rest of his family are played by Steven Page and Richard Burkhard, from last season’s Werther. Mad Margaret is taken by Heather Shipp, heard recently in the company’s Skin Deep. The wonderful Richard Angas sings the rôle of Old Adam Goodheart. Conductor John Wilson and director Jo Davies make their Opera North debuts.
30 January, 4, 12, 17, 20, 24 February, Grand Theatre, 46 New Briggate, LS1 6NZ, 0113 222 6222, 7.30pm (plus 12.30pm on 13 February), £10-£58
Posted on Wednesday 13th January 2010
TT
Sending you to Twitter, hold on... 
