Handbags and gladrags

Alas, one must occasionally forsake the delights of lambegs, bowler hats, merry badinage and slogans for the English summer opera season (that sort of fête champêtre stuff used to happen up here at a place called Castleward, and very drunken and jolly it was, but the killjoy feckers got to that too, and now the only music allowed is the grim spoon-dancing and bones-fiddlers of our rival traditions).

By far the best to date has been Charles Court Opera — imagine J.B. Priestley’s Good Companions, plus music – doing G&S’s

Iolanthe in the Roman theatre at Verulamium (it’s on tour through the summer). Gilbert’s freaky worlds have much in common with Lewis Carroll; Iolanthe is the one where the House of Lords, invaded by fairyland, discovers the ungovernability of the wild human heart, plus some jolly stuff about the non-separation of powers.

Now I know that the office of Lord High Chancellor isn’t what it used to be, and indeed perhaps it’s a blessing that we were spared, for example, a third generation of Hoggs mounting the Woolsack. And yet Iolanthe does depend a bit on fooflah with big sticks and wigs.

I suppose no institution could survive those photos of Michael Gove’s investiture as LC in 2015, and he and his successors (the present seat-warmer is called Buckland) do look awfully like that old David Low cartoon of little Ribbentrop swamped in Bismarck’s clothes. Iolanthe’s fairies will have to go tripping hither, tripping thither somewhere else.