The good and bad of perpetual motion
Stratford’s version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, is presented as if staged “in a manor home naval hospital” in 1917. So says the program; without its information I would have assumed that we had been set down for no reason in Downton Abbey. As for the time- frame: 1917 is scarcely closer to us than the opera’s actual birthdate of 1878, so contemporary relevance is hardly an issue. Besides, would a comic opera about the navy, however fantastical, be performed at the later date without some acknowledgment of the fact that there was a war on? It’s hard to imagine G& S, master satirists, letting such an opportunity go by.
For most of the evening, the frame can be forgotten. It seems that the stately home’s resources allow for the construction of a very handsome ship, Douglas Paraschuk designer. Upon its decks Lezlie Wade has mounted a very busy production, one that left me with mixed feelings. At times I thought the constant motion of all the characters actually helped the story; at others I thought it got in the way. As well as the persistent to-ING and fro-ING and marshalling of troops, there is a pervasive air of exaggeration, in defiance of the old and valid theatrical law that nonsense has to be taken seriously if it is to be funny.
It’s no accident Laurie Murdoch’s Sir Joseph Porter, the First Lord of the Admiralty who never went to sea and thus became ruler of the Queen’s Navee, the most disciplined and economical performance on hand, is also the most effective. The business he’s given at his first entrance, timidly reluctant even to set foot on board, is in a different world from all the rushing about, and a better one. Mark Uhre sings nobly as Ralph Rackstraw, the sailor who dares aspire to his captain’s daughter, but though his shipmates say t hat his apparently hopeless passion has made him absent- minded, that hardly justifies having him step into buckets and then stomp around in them. As his adored Josephine, who proves to reciprocate his feelings, Jennifer Rider- Shaw brings off some bravura coloratura. She should let up on it, though, when describing the life of poverty she faces with Ralph, the nearest Gilbert ever came to grim social realism. Steve Ross is a worthy Captain Corcoran, and Brad Rudy an excellent Dick Deadeye, the ugly seaman whose looks cause the rest of the crew to denounce every word he utters. Glynis Ranney is triumphantly predatory as Hebe, Sir Joseph’s first, and in this dispensation, only cousin — so what happened to the cousins whom he reckons up by dozens?
Musically the production is irreproachable, and its imported notions never really obscure the point and fun of the original. What, never? Well, very seldom.