No 37 -- Summer 1991 Edited by Michael Walters
This must be one of the silliest productions I have seen. The trouble today is that so many adaptors/directors seem to think they know better than the author. Well I have news for them. They don't! The action of adaptors Peter Mills and Shane Collins in setting the play at the time of King Richard the First was merely perverse, because IOLANTHE has not a single point of contact with that period. King Richard had nothing in common with Gilbert's Lord Chancellor, Strephon with Robin Hood, nor Phyllis with Maid Marion. Nor was the Parliament of that time anything like the 19th century Parliament of Gilbert's satire. Result: Most of the Parliamentary references had to be (rather clumsily) written out. In other words, the text which ought to help the production had been turned into a liability. It would have been better to have written a totally new libretto. So then why not go the whole hog and write new music, and make it a totally new piece? Why bother to do G&S if you think you can't do so without rewriting it all? The whole concept was a mess. In an 11th century setting, Gilbert's story simply did not make sense. King Richard did not have wards in chancery, nor spend his time sitting in court giving agreeable girls away. Robin Hood was not half a fairy, he did not go into Parliament, and if he had he would have done no good there – but not for the reasons Strephon puts forward. The silliest detail of all was when the King mistook the fairies for nuns!! Well, faced with a set of jet–set punks as the fairies were here depicted, there are a great many things a medieval king might have mistaken them for, but I am sure nuns would not have been on the list! The programme also printed a resume of Kenneth Baker's peculiar views regarding the satire in IOLANTHE. Apart from the fact that I totally disagree with Mr. Baker's ideas, they were irrelevant in the context of this production.
Through all this mess, it was not surprising that the cast were unable to create any genuine meaningful characters. Probably the most successful were Robin/Strephon (Johnny Willis) and Phyllis/Marion (Yvonne George), and although their characters bore no resemblance to those by which they addressed each other, they sang excellently and delivered the dialogue with intelligence. If only they had been able to give those performances (they behaved like Strephon and Phyllis, not like Robin and Marion) in the proper context. The King/Lord Chancellor (Peter Foster) started off well, in spite of the ridiculousness of singing about "the crown is the true embodiment" and being "a highly susceptible emperor". But much of his part really did not make sense. Kings do not behave like Lord Chancellors, and even with whole–scale rewriting of the part, it simply could not be squeezed into the mould which the authors had created.
Mountararat (Colin Phillips) as a beefy medieval baron, and Tolloller (Russell Bowes) as a twifley twee one, worked rather better, but the sword fight during the George/Thomas scene in Act 2 was somewhat gratuitous. It was very amusing – but for the same reason as it would have been amusing if they had thrown custard pies at each other. Sergeant Willis (Denys Firth) was of the King's bodyguard, and the words of his song were altered from Liberal and Conservative to the peasantry and the nobility. Yes, well, but why bother? The performer sang with gusto and came out of the productional morass with credit.
The Fairy Queen (Gloria Griffiths) was big and blowsy and her part was largely unaltered. The reference to Captain Shaw of course had to be removed, and replaced by, I forget what – the changes were so many that I could not remember them all afterwards. Much of the performance develloped into a mental game of – What are they going to do with such–and–such a line?
Iolanthe (Sue Morton) was grotesque and horrible. At the beginning of the Invocation she was seen in the equivalent of a stage box supposedly at the bottom of a stream, attended another water sprite and what was supposed to be a frog, but actually looked more like a salamander or newt. She rose clad in water weeds, but was not permitted any change of costume, remaining in the rather punk weeds hair–do and mermaid's tail through the entire play. She simpered and giggled her way through the part, for no very obvious reason. The result was that the character was totally unsympathetic – the prayer to the Lord Chancellor (sorry, the King) went for nothing (it might as well have been cut). And the idea of a fairy married to a King was ridiculous. Were we to suppose that Robin Hood/Strephon was the heir to the throne of England?
The three fairies (Jadwiga Lewis, Carol Felton and Debbie Astley) were adequate, though one spoke and sang in a strong Russian accent. Were there Russian fairies in medieval England? ...[It has recently come to light that the lady was actually Polish]
The orchestra, under the direction of Ricardo Gonzalez scraped its way through the most ragged and raucous rendering of the overture I have heard for a long time. I was too busy listening to the word changes to notice what they were doing during the rest of the production. By all means let us have new interpretations of G&S, but let them be inspired, intelligent concepts, not half–baked imbecillities like this. I hated every minute of this performance, but I thoroughly enjoyed writing the review!
MICHAEL WALTERS
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