Gilbert & Sullivan

East meets West: Dorothy Atkinson, Shirley Henderson and Cathy Sara in 'Topsy-Turvy', Mike Leigh's 1999 biographical treatment of Gilbert and Sullivan
I can still remember my first encounter with the genius of Gilbert and Sullivan. It was an unbearably hot afternoon in Bangkok in the early Seventies, and students from the American School were presenting The Mikado. Two black girls and one Caucasian sang Three Little Maids from School Are We in thick Bronx accents. The orchestra was pretty ropy and the heat made the strings slide more and more out of tune.
Much of the wordplay got lost, but plenty of it survived. I remember the audience – which included a lot of American soldiers on “Rest and Recuperation” from Vietnam – laughed as much as the small contingent of Brits.

So, here was a quintessentially English operetta set in a make-believe Japan, being performed by Americans in Bangkok, 90 years after it was written. If being able to survive rough handling and transplantation into unfamiliar cultural territory is the sign of a masterpiece, then the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan must rank among the greatest. And unlike some canonical works, these have never suffered a dip in their fortunes. From the moment Trial by Jury appeared in 1875 it’s been a story of unbroken success.
Like many successful partnerships, this one was a union of opposites. WS Gilbert was a lawyer by training, and before he met Sullivan he’d already become a successful writer in every theatrical genre – pantomime, melodrama, burlesque and farce. He had an instinct for wordplay that was surreal and legalistically exact at once. But his taste for satire didn’t always play well with the critics, and more than once he had to take legal action against journals accusing him of vulgarity and immorality.
Arthur Sullivan, on the other hand, had an easy charm and an ability to please that made him the darling of London’s social set. His Onward Christian Soldiers pleased the Victorian taste for strenuous moralism, and The Lost Chord caught the era’s sentimentality to perfection. He’d trained in Leipzig, where he acquired a cast-iron technique and a subtle sense of orchestral colour. But his greatest gift was knowing just how to shape a melody around the rhythm and sense of words.
The catalyst that brought these two together was the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, who was determined to find an English team that could break Offenbach’s dominance of operetta. He persuaded Gilbert to read his libretto Trial by Jury to Sullivan, much against his will, but fortunately Sullivan rocked with laughter all the way through. Sullivan wrote the score in two weeks and the result was a smash hit that ran for two years. Thus a partnership was born that lasted, on and off, for 20 years.
Their success was phenomenal. At one time there were eight performances of HMS Pinafore running simultaneously in New York, all of them pirated. In Vienna the British duo were serious rivals to Strauss and Lehár. No corner of the world could resist – at one point in the 1890s there were three G&S productions running at the same time in Buenos Aires. The trio made so much money they were able to build the Savoy Theatre, the first theatre in London to be powered entirely by electricity – which is why the operettas are often called the Savoy Operas.
So what’s the secret of their longevity? Part of it is simple melodic charm. There are straightforward tunes like We Sail the Ocean Blue from HMS Pinafore, and a particular kind of sweet pathos in songs such as The Sun Whose Rays in The Mikado. But it’s rare that you just want to hum or whistle a G & S melody. Mostly you want to sing the words, too, because the two are inseparable.
Another aspect of the operettas that never palls is their satire. The moment in Iolanthe when The Peers sing “Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes! Bow, bow, ye tradesmen bow ye masses” would surely get a bigger laugh now than ever, as would Pooh-Bah’s smug recital of his long list of official titles.
You could say that the magic, impossible coincidences and contrived happy endings mean the satire lacks any edge. But the magic and the silliness is a kind of satire, aimed at the genre itself. In The Mikado the authors keep undercutting their own pretensions to be writing a Japanese operetta, as in the line where Ko-ko tells the Mikado that Nanky-poo’s name “might have been on his pocket handkerchief, but the Japanese don’t use pocket handkerchiefs”. There’s a hilarious moment in The Pirates of Penzance where the conventions of the genre are sent up. The chorus of Policemen sings over and over again, “Forward on the foe, we go, we go, we go, we GO!” “Yes, but you don’t go”, says the Major-General testily. He’s a proper military man and doesn’t understand the convention that operatic choruses have to repeat.
The appeal of G&S’s special blend of charm, silliness and gentle satire seems immune to fashion. There are hundreds of amateur G&S societies here and in the United States, and many specialist operetta companies, several of which are appearing at the Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton. And there are fans in the wider music theatre world. Joseph Papp presented an outdoor production of The Pirates of Penzance in Central Park with a cast including Linda Ronstadt, and Jonathan Miller’s Mikado was a staple of English National Opera for years. Annoying though it might be to their detractors, G&S are indestructible. They’ll still be with us long after many more self-important and “serious” operas have disappeared.