It’s a tricky time for English National Opera. Some commentators suggest that the company should leave its cherished home at the London Coliseum and relocate to somewhere smaller; others wonder if London even needs a second opera house: isn’t the Royal Opera House enough? If I ruled the world, I’d say, “No” to both suggestions, but more worrying is an imminent Arts Council England decision about ENO’s future grant prospects, which are far from rosy.
For now, at least, the show must go on, and when a show is needed, ENO often turns to Gilbert and Sullivan. The Yeomen of the Guard, premiered in 1888, now joins a long list of ENO productions dating back at least as far as Jonathan Miller’s celebrated 1985 staging of The Mikado. G&S liked an exotic setting and they put Yeomen in the 16th century, a conceit which cramps Gilbert’s verbal style, and that in turn inhibits Sullivan’s music.
The plot is not short of the required absurdities: Colonel Fairfax is falsely imprisoned in the Tower of London as a spy; in an hour’s time, he will be hanged. Phoebe, daughter of one of the Yeomen, thinks she’s in love with him and cooks up a rescue plot; she succeeds, but finds that his affections are focused on Elsie, a passing street entertainer. Somehow or other, it comes out right, sort of, in the end.
ENO’s production, in Anthony Ward’s rather lumbering designs, is staged by Jo Davies, who, with choreographer Kay Shepherd works hard to inject a bit of Broadway flamboyance. Conductor Chris Hopkins makes sure that the ENO orchestra offers its full support, but success is only intermittent. Davies relocates the action to the mid-20th century, and she’s made free with Gilbert’s text.
Some of her amendments are laboured: do we need more jokes about Brexit, just to show how on-message opera can be? Others are clever, such as borrowing a number from Ruddigore, another G&S opera, and embellishing it so that it almost out-patters Gilbert. If anything, the show could be more irreverent, more boisterous. Shorter wouldn’t be bad either: the stilted spoken dialogue would be improved by some swingeing cuts.
Musically things work better. As Fairfax, the hero, Anthony Gregory’s tenor is ardent but occasionally strained, while Richard McCabe’s comic turn as a worn-out jester-turned-hustler – think George Cole in The Belles of St Trinians – goes in and out of focus.
The women fare best: as the prison governor, Susan Bickley puts her resonant mezzo-soprano voice to good comedic use, while Heather Lowe’s Phoebe is brightly sung but somewhat over-acted. The most winning characterisation, both vocal and dramatic, comes from Alexandra Oomens in the role of Elsie, pert and clear as a bell, just as Gilbert and Sullivan would have wanted.
