THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE
PIRATES OF PENZANCE at the Sydney Theatre, November 10-24 2012. Photos by Lisa Tomasetti: the company en tableau; right: Joseph Houston.
Director Sasha Regan is one of London's most celebrated enfants incroyable and her all-male production of one of the most aspic-paralysed operettas in the repertoire is therefore rightly famous. Starting out off-West End in a tiny theatre and then carrying all before it, The Pirates of Penzance has been delighting audiences around the world for some time before it arrived in Australia for an extensive regional and city tour.
Regan has managed an unlikely tightrope act with her Pirates in that it (surely) doesn't offend traditionalists by doing something daft like setting it on the starship Enterprise. Yet at the same time however she has stripped away the usual 19th century clutter to robustly muscular essentials for a new generation.
Gilbert & Sullivan is (are?) an acquired taste. It's somehow quintessentially British - of the old-colonial school - and is frightfully perky, immensely clever in the lyric department and requires top-notch performers to pull it off. It should be light as a souffle and as deceptively simple; odd then that it's also one of the cornerstones of amateur outfits or those for whom the term "clodhopping" might have been invented. Regan and Company demonstrate how it should be done.
The key is in the early appearance of the lovelorn nurse Ruth, and in casting Joseph Houston in the role. He is tall, bony and rather splendid in the manner of an aged thoroughbred horse. He just doesn't look like a romantic heroine. Therefore he is perfect as the woman who yearns hopelessly for the love of young hero Frederic (Matthew Gent). As soon as the Major-General's daughters appear it's logical and obvious that naive Frederic will quickly work out the meaning of sex appeal and pretty. For the audience, the hurdle of suspending disbelief in their alleged femininity is immediately cleared, without further thought or artifice.
As the daughters, Stewart Charlesworth, Lee Greenaway, Chris Theo Cook and Dale Page are clad in variously appropriate petticoats, bustiers, gowns, ballet slippers and bloomers, but there is no drag-style makeup or wigs - no fake female accoutrements. It's an intelligent and crucial choice. As is the casting of Alan Richardson as Frederic's love, Mabel. He could take on operatic male soprano or counter tenor roles if he wished and his top notes and soulfulness are in Antony and the Johnsons territory, instantly banishing any idea of pantomime belly laughs.
The gender characterisations are also made clear, without fuss or nudge-nudge-wink-wink, by a difference as simple as the pirates' Doc Marten's boots, joyously toy-like wooden swords and pec-pervy open shirts and vests. Pity they didn't visit at Mardi Gras time!
As a touring show, the setting has to be easily portable (happily the money seems to have been spent on the company) and the design by Robyn Wilson-Owen is simple and effective. Some cut-out cloud shapes hang in front of a sky blue background; a higgledy-piggledy stack of rough wooden crates conjure the pirate ship, wreckage, plunder - whatever - and the playing area is kept clear for Lizzie Gee's choreographing of the pirates and the worthies encountered along the way. She has them buckling their swashes and jigging and twirling and also forming the vital and hilariously silly tableaux that characterised so much awful Victorian music theatre.
Interesting for a Sydney audience is how well the company, as a whole, copes with the Sydney Theatre's somewhat notorious acoustics - apparently without radio-miked amplification. What this says about the technique of the visiting players - and about our unthinking reliance on electronics and degrees of loudness - is something to be debated. The only time there is any real problem (and it's quite serious, nevertheless) is when Neil Moors struggles somewhat with the tongue-twisting speed-sing of the infamous "I am the very model of a modern Major-General…" It needs to be crystal clear and it's not; the words ending up in a mush of inaudibility. But he's damned debonair and mostly gets away with it.
What they also get away with - at the same time delivering an object lesson in the possible joys of minimalism - is doing away with a large orchestra in favour of musical director Michael England and a grand piano. He is placed below the stage between audience and players and the intimacy of it makes one feel rather like being part of a drawing room entertainment writ large.
Altogether, this visiting Pirates of Penzance is a delight for fans of G&S and musical theatre/operetta alike. And if you still wonder whether it's for you - this is the production that will sway you one way or the other. If you don't enjoy it, G&S is not for you because you're unlikely to experience a better re-interpretation of the genre.
