Sausage Rolls in Pfennig-Halbpfennig Land
I am very fond of sausage rolls; in fact they’re my favourite party nibble. But they will never seem quite the same again after reading Gilbert's libretto for The Grand Duke, the final Gilbert and Sullivan Savoy comic opera in a remarkable series.
When the Dunedin audience warm to Sullivan's overture and the curtain goes up on the Mayfair Theatre stage in August 2012, The Really Authentic Gilbert and Sullivan Performance Trust will have made a little bit of theatrical history, for since its initial one hundred and twenty-three night run at the Savoy Theatre, London in 1896, The Grand Duke has had few full-scale productions anywhere in the world, and possibly only two in New Zealand's theatrical and musical history.
Sullivan, who as usual was in the pit conducting on the first night, thought the opera had not gone too badly. He wrote in his diary:
Opera went well. Over at 11.15. Parts of it dragged a little, dialogue too redundant, but success great and genuine I think.
But Gilbert went home and wrote to his friend, Mrs. Bram Stoker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Stoker - wife of the author of Dracula):
I'm not at all a proud Mother, and I never want to see this ugly misshapen little brat again.
We will have the opportunity to decide which of them was right. The Grand Duke has been dismissed or simply ignored by many writers on the Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration, but the surprising success of our production of Utopia (Limited), with its still topical political satire, comic scenes and merry music, shows that it never pays to write off a late play just because of what the critics say.
When Sullivan received Gilbert's outline of the libretto, he was pleased and replied that it came out "as clear and bright as possible". Yes, as the source (sauce) hunters point out, The Grand Duke recycles the main plot idea of Gilbert's first collaboration with Sullivan, Thespis, in which a group of actors take over the management of Olympus. In this later play another troupe of actors find themselves running a tumultuous German Duchy. And, yes, there are elements apparently taken from The Duke's Dilemma (1853), a short story by Tom Taylor ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Taylor), published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1853, about a poor duke who hires French actors to play courtiers to impress his rich fiancJe. And yes, there is an earlier version of the comic legally dead/actually alive motif in Cox and Box, and yes, Gilbert was probably trying to cash in on the popularity of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda. But so what? Playwrights have always hunted among the stories of other writers to find narrative material for their own play. Shakespeare, notoriously, seems never to have invented a single plot, and look what he did with his borrowed tales. Gilbert did cash in: he sold the libretto of the new piece to Carte and Sullivan for £5,000, taking no risks over its success or failure.
We in our turn are confident that our final production will honour the genius of those two immortal partners, Gilbert and Sullivan, and we reckon on staging a clear, bright show that will delight our audiences. And what about those sausage rolls? Well, you’ll have to be there with your other friends at the Mayfair to find out about them — the sausage rolls, I mean.
Colin Gibson
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Dunedin
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