TheatreguideLondon
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The TheatreguideLondon Review
Iolanthe
Wilton's Music Hall Spring 2011
Director
Sasha Regan follows up last year's successful all-male Pirates of
Penzance with another loving Gilbert and Sullivan spoof, like its
predecessor transferred from the Union Theatre, and no one but the most
hidebound D'Oyly Carte purists could be anything but delighted.
For the
uninitiated, the plot of Iolanthe is typical Gilbert nonsense,
something about the half-mortal son of a fairy loving the Lord
Chancellor's ward, who is also being wooed by the entire House of
Lords.
Like most G&S
operettas, it features songs you know even if you don't know you know
them, like the one about faint hearts and fair ladies, the one about
lying awake with a dismal headache, the one about the House of Peers
doing nothing in particular, and the one about how all babies are
Liberals or Conservatives.
The spirit and
effect of this company's gender-bending is much like that of the
all-male Trocadero ballet - just as the male ballerinas of the Trocs
have to be expert dancers to make their dancing funny, so the singing
here, whether soprano or baritone (and sometimes both), is faultless
and lovely, the comedy laid on top of a solid musical base.
And the comedy is
certainly here, from the moment a chorus of men in tights and corsets
flutter on as fairies in a manner for which the label 'camp' seems
woefully inadequate, through their reappearance, singing an octave
lower, as only marginally more butch Peers, to the decision - for no
particular reason other than that it's funny - to make the
philosophical guard a kilted Scotsman.
The camp comedy is
not merely a matter of flouncing about. Director Regan and
choreographer Mark Smith create a tightly disciplined and highly
polished mode in which every visual joke is expertly judged and
executed, and so every bit of invention scores, down to every subtle
arched eyebrow and the comic identity of each individual peer and
fairy.
Amidst the general
silliness, the young lovers are played appropriately (pardon the
expression) straight, nicely anchoring the evening in, if not reality,
at least the world of romantic operetta, so that it doesn't totally
float away in whimsy.
The important point
is that Iolanthe can take this treatment, and even thrives on it.
Gilbert's libretto is very much aware of its own silliness ('The night
has been long, ditto ditto my song, and thank goodness they're both of
them over'), and Sasha Regan's added filigree is very much in the
original spirit.
It is certainly far
more alive and far more a tribute to G&S than the moribund museum
pieces of the D'Oyly Carte's declining years.
Do I have any
negatives? Merely nit-picking. The script doesn't give director or
choreographer as much opportunity to be inventive in the second act,
and comic energy flags a bit. And surely the Nightmare Song, one of
Gilbert's greatest patter numbers, desperately wants to be sung faster.
Louis Maskell and
Alan Richardson are charming as the lovers, Shaun McCourt droll as the
Chancellor, and Reuben Kaye, Adam Lewis Ford, Matthew James Willis and
Luke Fredericks standing out as, respectively, two leading fairies and
two leading lords.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review - Iolanthe - Wilton's 2011
