Pirates of Penzance
Ever since I read The Secret of the Unicorn as a wide-eyed kid of five, I've been an absolute sucker for pirate stories. I used to play at pirates in my drawing room with my childhood school-friends (our ship always sank, and I used to get away by using a pillow for a raft), and I swear by all four of the Pirates of the Caribbean series (yes, yes, I know, it all went downhill after the first one - I don't care what you say).
So when I saw a poster for Pirates of Penzance stuck up just opposite the Balliol lodge, I formed a vague intention to go see it. 7 30, and today was the last performance. I looked out of the library window at 7. It was pitch black, and raining hard. I had just gotten into some kind of writing rhythm - having taken up my eternally unfinished science fiction novel again after two years. I had only the faintest idea of the work of Gilbert and Sullivan, the Wikipedia entry wasn't exactly alluring, an OxStu review was lukewarm, and it was, after all, a student production. I could feel the vague intention dissolving into indifference. I pinged Karpet and Akanksha on GTalk, wondering if they knew anything about this. K had only heard a couple of tracks, and A knew as much as I did. But they both said, just go, take a chance. And I looked out of my window again. 7 15. A fifteen minute walk to Magdalen in the rain, since I'd forgotten my bike.
Just go, dammit. Take a chance. A random punt. One winger and a prayer, as they say in football. Isn't that how we've lived all our life?
So I went. And had one of the best evenings of my life.
Gilbert and Sullivan are bloody brilliant. In The Pirates of Penzance, I heard the laughter of Rabelais, the savage mockery of Quixote, the irony of Don Juan and the gentle humour of Wodehouse. It is like an ironic rendering of Byron's The Corsair. The basic plot could serve as a Spanish tragedy - crime, revenge, the conflict between duty and love - but in every line, every word, every note, there is such delightful irony. Duty is mocked. Love is treated like the canard that it is. Revenge is laughed at. The idea of the grand, the noble, the tragic, the majestic - in a word, the essence of romanticism - is taken apart with forensic precision. And yet - this is what I found most interesting - it rarely (apart from, arguably, "I am the Model of a Modern Major-General") descends into farce. Somehow, despite the fun and the dancing and the laughter, seriousness lurks in the background, as though the very irony is meant to remind us of the constant presence of tragedy in our world, keeping us aware at all times that it could, at any moment, transform into The Corsair. The Opera moved throughout, I felt, in this strange, ambiguous zone of light and shadow, never committing itself to unbridled revelry, never entirely embracing the comic. It felt, almost - and I know this is a hideous way of putting it - as though Aeschylus was trying to write Aristophanes.
And then there are echoes, echoes and undertones that go deeper. The pirate King says to Frederic: "I don't think much of our profession, but compared with respectability, it is comparatively honest." This line could be right out of Mark Twain, something picked out of The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, or The Stolen White Element. You laugh when the pirate King delivers the line in his inimitable way, but then the laughter ceases and something else lingers, and you begin to think. And it's reinforced by the song he sings immediately afterwards, taking swipes at the "sanctimonious part" played by all who would be pillars of society, and the crimes committed by divinely ordained monarchs. The comedy has suddenly turned into a critique. And there's something similar, I felt, with Frederic's denouncement of Ruth - I laughed wildly when they were delivering those hilarious lines: "Upon my innocence you play// I'm not the one to plot so// Your face is lined, your hair is grey// It's gradually got so" - but there's no doubt that Frederic's callous behaviour here, dismissing Ruth solely on the basis of her age and her looks - entirely prevents us from taking his love affair with Mabel even remotely seriously, because he's made it abundantly clear that for him, beauty is skin-deep. And in this way, the central love affair of the story inverts itself and becomes, in a sense, a comment and a mockery of the romanticists' sanctification of love, love as the ideal and the eternal. What makes it even better is that Frederic and Mabel do speak to each other in language that could have been written by Southey, or one of the other gushing Romantics - "Did ever maiden close/ Her eyes on waking sadness/ To dream of such exceeding gladness?" But the context has already de-romanticised it to such an extent, that even these lines, solemn and majestic in themselves, become only funny. The same thing happens when Frederic is forced to rejoin the pirates - he and Mabel create a touching scene of parting - verse that could have come from the pen of Tennyson - and then shatter it completely when Frederic says, "In 1940, I will be of age.." You're reminded of the tragic for a brief moment, before laughter comes again, and yet, that original sense remains, and doesn't disappear entirely.
But sometimes, the laughter isn't so quick or prompt to come. General Stanley sings alone at night, a song about how the poplars and the brook both fall in love with the breeze, and then:
GEN. Yet, the breeze is but a rover,
When he wings away,
Brook and poplar mourn a lover
Sighing, "Well-a-day!"
MEN. Well-a-day!
GEN. Ah! the doing and undoing,
That the rogue could tell!
When the breeze is out a-wooing,
Who can woo so well?
There is no laughter here, but depth and seriousness, and it's hardly undone by his daughters rushing in after the song is completed (if they had wanted to break this particular emotion, they would have had them interrupt). And it's moments like these that create the shadows in which the opera moves, that uncertain zone, that disorients you at times, so that even when you're laughing, you're wondering if you really should be, whether there isn't something you're missing after all, whether there isn't more than a hint of sadness to this.
At this point, I will follow the example of the opera, and move from seriousness to quoting in full one part of the song of the Major-General, since it is an absolutely brilliant parody on the idea of the Renaissance man.
I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's;
I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox,
I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,
In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous;
I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,
I know the croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes!
Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore,
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.
...
Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform,
And tell you every detail of Caractacus's uniform:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
Sheer genius. In choice of language and theme, the parody is perfect - history, poetry, logic, mathematics, art, drama, music, language and the art of war - the complete attributes of the Renaissance man - mocked to scorn - along with a self-effacing self-reference thrown in (Pinafore was also a G&S opera).
And what of the Policemen's role? I cannot describe quite how madly, riotously, divinely hilarious it was. I was quite literally rolling in the aisles, laughing almost hysterically and thumping our cushioned seat. Such a madly irreverent mockery of the police, of the ideals of soldierhood, of that old chant, "death or glory". Cowardly policemen-soldiers who don't want danger and have no wish to die. In All Quiet on the Western Front, they are the supreme subjects of pity and tragedy. In Pirates of Penzance, they draw unrestrained laughter. I cannot resist, again, quoting in full, but quoting doesn't even begin to capture the scene, because a lot of its impact lay in the acting, the facial expressions, and the coordination. Nonetheless:
When the foeman bares his steel,
Tarantara! tarantara!
We uncomfortable feel,
Tarantara!
And we find the wisest thing,
Tarantara! tarantara!
Is to slap our chests and sing,
Tarantara!
For when threatened with emeutes,
Tarantara! tarantara!
And your heart is in your boots,
Tarantara!
There is nothing brings it round
Like the trumpet's martial sound,
Like the trumpet's martial sound
ALL. Tarantara! tarantara!, etc.
MABEL. Go, ye heroes, go to glory,
Though you die in combat gory,
Ye shall live in song and story.
Go to immortality!
Go to death, and go to slaughter;
Die, and every Cornish daughter
With her tears your grave shall water.
Go, ye heroes, go and die!
GIRLS. Go, ye heroes, go and die!
SERGEANT, with POLICE.
Though to us it's evident,
Tarantara! tarantara!
These attentions are well meant,
Tarantara!
Such expressions don't appear,
Tarantara! tarantara!
Calculated men to cheer,
Tarantara!
Who are going to meet their fate
In a highly nervous state.
Tarantara! tarantara! tarantara!
Still to us it's evident
These attentions are well meant.
Tarantara! tarantara! tarantara!
EDITH. Go and do your best endeavour,
And before all links we sever,
We will say farewell for ever.
Go to glory and the grave!
GIRLS. Go to glory and the grave!
For your foes are fierce and ruthless,
False, unmerciful, and truthless;
Young and tender, old and toothless,
All in vain their mercy crave.
SERG. We observe too great a stress,
On the risks that on us press,
And of reference a lack
To our chance of coming back.
Still, perhaps it would be wise
Not to carp or criticise,
For it's very evident
These attentions are well meant.
POLICE. Yes, it's very evident These attentions are well meant, etc.
Bonkers. And the ending, which I will not reveal here for spoiling the whole thing completely, is an apt summation in terms of its inversions and ironies.
And a note of seriousness, to end. There was a beautifully touching gesture to round off a very well performed show. A vote of thanks, and two in particular caught my attention. The first was to Magdalen College, that had provided the venue and the infrastructure to make this student performance possible. And the second to a someone - he was there among us in the audience - who had designed all the costumes for free.
Too often, over the last year and a half, with all its number-locked doors and its constant battel reminders and its predatory recruiting and the constant buzz about sponsorship and funding and its beautiful, wonderful libraries where you cannot go without a Bod Card (and thus, certification of having paid your money to be here), Oxford has resembled, far too much for my liking, a commercial enterprise. Yet tonight, briefly, as I walked back in the rain down Longwall Street, that impression dissolved, and I felt, if only for a few moments, that I had lived an evening in the Oxford of my dreams, the city of dreaming spires, where Hugh Latimer spoke of lighting a candle that would never be put out, where Mathew Arnold wrote Cromwell, where Tolkien and Lewis strolled down Addison's Walk at midnight, and so much more.
Just a simple evening watching a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but two beautiful hours in Oxford.
So when I saw a poster for Pirates of Penzance stuck up just opposite the Balliol lodge, I formed a vague intention to go see it. 7 30, and today was the last performance. I looked out of the library window at 7. It was pitch black, and raining hard. I had just gotten into some kind of writing rhythm - having taken up my eternally unfinished science fiction novel again after two years. I had only the faintest idea of the work of Gilbert and Sullivan, the Wikipedia entry wasn't exactly alluring, an OxStu review was lukewarm, and it was, after all, a student production. I could feel the vague intention dissolving into indifference. I pinged Karpet and Akanksha on GTalk, wondering if they knew anything about this. K had only heard a couple of tracks, and A knew as much as I did. But they both said, just go, take a chance. And I looked out of my window again. 7 15. A fifteen minute walk to Magdalen in the rain, since I'd forgotten my bike.
Just go, dammit. Take a chance. A random punt. One winger and a prayer, as they say in football. Isn't that how we've lived all our life?
So I went. And had one of the best evenings of my life.
Gilbert and Sullivan are bloody brilliant. In The Pirates of Penzance, I heard the laughter of Rabelais, the savage mockery of Quixote, the irony of Don Juan and the gentle humour of Wodehouse. It is like an ironic rendering of Byron's The Corsair. The basic plot could serve as a Spanish tragedy - crime, revenge, the conflict between duty and love - but in every line, every word, every note, there is such delightful irony. Duty is mocked. Love is treated like the canard that it is. Revenge is laughed at. The idea of the grand, the noble, the tragic, the majestic - in a word, the essence of romanticism - is taken apart with forensic precision. And yet - this is what I found most interesting - it rarely (apart from, arguably, "I am the Model of a Modern Major-General") descends into farce. Somehow, despite the fun and the dancing and the laughter, seriousness lurks in the background, as though the very irony is meant to remind us of the constant presence of tragedy in our world, keeping us aware at all times that it could, at any moment, transform into The Corsair. The Opera moved throughout, I felt, in this strange, ambiguous zone of light and shadow, never committing itself to unbridled revelry, never entirely embracing the comic. It felt, almost - and I know this is a hideous way of putting it - as though Aeschylus was trying to write Aristophanes.
And then there are echoes, echoes and undertones that go deeper. The pirate King says to Frederic: "I don't think much of our profession, but compared with respectability, it is comparatively honest." This line could be right out of Mark Twain, something picked out of The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, or The Stolen White Element. You laugh when the pirate King delivers the line in his inimitable way, but then the laughter ceases and something else lingers, and you begin to think. And it's reinforced by the song he sings immediately afterwards, taking swipes at the "sanctimonious part" played by all who would be pillars of society, and the crimes committed by divinely ordained monarchs. The comedy has suddenly turned into a critique. And there's something similar, I felt, with Frederic's denouncement of Ruth - I laughed wildly when they were delivering those hilarious lines: "Upon my innocence you play// I'm not the one to plot so// Your face is lined, your hair is grey// It's gradually got so" - but there's no doubt that Frederic's callous behaviour here, dismissing Ruth solely on the basis of her age and her looks - entirely prevents us from taking his love affair with Mabel even remotely seriously, because he's made it abundantly clear that for him, beauty is skin-deep. And in this way, the central love affair of the story inverts itself and becomes, in a sense, a comment and a mockery of the romanticists' sanctification of love, love as the ideal and the eternal. What makes it even better is that Frederic and Mabel do speak to each other in language that could have been written by Southey, or one of the other gushing Romantics - "Did ever maiden close/ Her eyes on waking sadness/ To dream of such exceeding gladness?" But the context has already de-romanticised it to such an extent, that even these lines, solemn and majestic in themselves, become only funny. The same thing happens when Frederic is forced to rejoin the pirates - he and Mabel create a touching scene of parting - verse that could have come from the pen of Tennyson - and then shatter it completely when Frederic says, "In 1940, I will be of age.." You're reminded of the tragic for a brief moment, before laughter comes again, and yet, that original sense remains, and doesn't disappear entirely.
But sometimes, the laughter isn't so quick or prompt to come. General Stanley sings alone at night, a song about how the poplars and the brook both fall in love with the breeze, and then:
GEN. Yet, the breeze is but a rover,
When he wings away,
Brook and poplar mourn a lover
Sighing, "Well-a-day!"
MEN. Well-a-day!
GEN. Ah! the doing and undoing,
That the rogue could tell!
When the breeze is out a-wooing,
Who can woo so well?
There is no laughter here, but depth and seriousness, and it's hardly undone by his daughters rushing in after the song is completed (if they had wanted to break this particular emotion, they would have had them interrupt). And it's moments like these that create the shadows in which the opera moves, that uncertain zone, that disorients you at times, so that even when you're laughing, you're wondering if you really should be, whether there isn't something you're missing after all, whether there isn't more than a hint of sadness to this.
At this point, I will follow the example of the opera, and move from seriousness to quoting in full one part of the song of the Major-General, since it is an absolutely brilliant parody on the idea of the Renaissance man.
I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's;
I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox,
I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,
In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous;
I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,
I know the croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes!
Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore,
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.
...
Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform,
And tell you every detail of Caractacus's uniform:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
Sheer genius. In choice of language and theme, the parody is perfect - history, poetry, logic, mathematics, art, drama, music, language and the art of war - the complete attributes of the Renaissance man - mocked to scorn - along with a self-effacing self-reference thrown in (Pinafore was also a G&S opera).
And what of the Policemen's role? I cannot describe quite how madly, riotously, divinely hilarious it was. I was quite literally rolling in the aisles, laughing almost hysterically and thumping our cushioned seat. Such a madly irreverent mockery of the police, of the ideals of soldierhood, of that old chant, "death or glory". Cowardly policemen-soldiers who don't want danger and have no wish to die. In All Quiet on the Western Front, they are the supreme subjects of pity and tragedy. In Pirates of Penzance, they draw unrestrained laughter. I cannot resist, again, quoting in full, but quoting doesn't even begin to capture the scene, because a lot of its impact lay in the acting, the facial expressions, and the coordination. Nonetheless:
When the foeman bares his steel,
Tarantara! tarantara!
We uncomfortable feel,
Tarantara!
And we find the wisest thing,
Tarantara! tarantara!
Is to slap our chests and sing,
Tarantara!
For when threatened with emeutes,
Tarantara! tarantara!
And your heart is in your boots,
Tarantara!
There is nothing brings it round
Like the trumpet's martial sound,
Like the trumpet's martial sound
ALL. Tarantara! tarantara!, etc.
MABEL. Go, ye heroes, go to glory,
Though you die in combat gory,
Ye shall live in song and story.
Go to immortality!
Go to death, and go to slaughter;
Die, and every Cornish daughter
With her tears your grave shall water.
Go, ye heroes, go and die!
GIRLS. Go, ye heroes, go and die!
SERGEANT, with POLICE.
Though to us it's evident,
Tarantara! tarantara!
These attentions are well meant,
Tarantara!
Such expressions don't appear,
Tarantara! tarantara!
Calculated men to cheer,
Tarantara!
Who are going to meet their fate
In a highly nervous state.
Tarantara! tarantara! tarantara!
Still to us it's evident
These attentions are well meant.
Tarantara! tarantara! tarantara!
EDITH. Go and do your best endeavour,
And before all links we sever,
We will say farewell for ever.
Go to glory and the grave!
GIRLS. Go to glory and the grave!
For your foes are fierce and ruthless,
False, unmerciful, and truthless;
Young and tender, old and toothless,
All in vain their mercy crave.
SERG. We observe too great a stress,
On the risks that on us press,
And of reference a lack
To our chance of coming back.
Still, perhaps it would be wise
Not to carp or criticise,
For it's very evident
These attentions are well meant.
POLICE. Yes, it's very evident These attentions are well meant, etc.
Bonkers. And the ending, which I will not reveal here for spoiling the whole thing completely, is an apt summation in terms of its inversions and ironies.
And a note of seriousness, to end. There was a beautifully touching gesture to round off a very well performed show. A vote of thanks, and two in particular caught my attention. The first was to Magdalen College, that had provided the venue and the infrastructure to make this student performance possible. And the second to a someone - he was there among us in the audience - who had designed all the costumes for free.
Too often, over the last year and a half, with all its number-locked doors and its constant battel reminders and its predatory recruiting and the constant buzz about sponsorship and funding and its beautiful, wonderful libraries where you cannot go without a Bod Card (and thus, certification of having paid your money to be here), Oxford has resembled, far too much for my liking, a commercial enterprise. Yet tonight, briefly, as I walked back in the rain down Longwall Street, that impression dissolved, and I felt, if only for a few moments, that I had lived an evening in the Oxford of my dreams, the city of dreaming spires, where Hugh Latimer spoke of lighting a candle that would never be put out, where Mathew Arnold wrote Cromwell, where Tolkien and Lewis strolled down Addison's Walk at midnight, and so much more.
Just a simple evening watching a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but two beautiful hours in Oxford.