Opera group away with the fairies in first G&S venture
Iolanthe by Kennet Opera
at The Great Hall, Shaw House
on Saturday, February 8 and Sunday 9
Review by MICHAEL CHAPMAN
AFTER 30 years of mostly ‘grand’ opera, Kennet Opera decided on a change this year, and staged Iolanthe as their first full Gilbert & Sullivan venture. Another big first was the debut of the company’s new music director, Harry Stanton.
As KO chair Susan Moore put it: “We thought a performance to cheer everyone up was worth the risk!” And it was; their two shows in Shaw House’s Great Hall sold out well in advance.
From the opening moments, we realised that it wasn’t just their singing and acting that the cast were showing us, but their dress sense and hairstyling too.
No wigs, no wings!
“Fairies with attitude”, as co-director and costume chief Duncan Powell termed them, made up their own look: denim jackets, pigtails, boots, ribbons.
‘Private’ Willis wasn’t a guardsman, but a G5 security operative with a scruffy reflective jacket.
And the peers’ contrasting get-up worked equally well: their business suits and ties, if anything, pointing up the blue-blooded nonsense that they spouted.
Politics in Iolanthe, whether to do with the house of peers, the legal profession or the rights of women, were obviously there from its launch in 1882, and we may wonder at how Gilbert’s satirical take on entitlement and inequality still rings true.
On one side of the inequality divide, the Lord Chancellor (Don Crerar), whether in chain of office or night-things, was a fountain of words, spoken and sung – and how many words there were!
His Fairy Queen counterpart, Susan Moore, strangely had the more serious role, and temperament, starting with the problem of Iolanthe’s death sentence in Scene 1 – and it wasn’t the only death sentence to be threatened.
There’s a divide, too, between fairies (who are immortal) and the rest of us. But in Iolanthe it was resolved in the happiest of ways (involving marriage) by the final curtain.
The resolution was celebrated by two spirited choruses, peers and fairies, and by those whose happiness it secured, notably the young lovers Strephon and Phyllis (Oliver Embourne, Lucy Fitt), Iolanthe herself (Maddie Smart) and – believe it or not – by the Lord Chancellor.
