Gilbert & Sullivan
Opera North
Lowry, Salford
November 14, 2024: 2 hrs 55 mins
(Also on November 21 at Nottingham Theatre Royal)
Ruddigore is a gift for an imaginative director and an opera company with major resources, and that’s precisely what it had in 2010, when this production by Jo Davies was new, and what it still has on its revival.
The reason is that it’s more akin to satire of the kind we know today than the gentle pastiche-and-send-up of most of the other Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. It’s a thoroughgoing spoof of the popular Victorian theatrical style known as melodrama, with its heroes and villains and fair maidens, and its spooky stage effects. It’s all about a bad baronet (not a baron, as in the standard model) who has inherited a curse that means he must do one crime a day (at least) to avoid dying in horrible agony. The hero is good Robin Oakapple, the seemingly honest village lad – who turns out to be the real baronet in disguise – his younger, adopted, brother having taken on the role (with relish) when it was presumed that he had died.
The fair maiden is Rose Maybud, a girl so prim she takes all her cues from a book of Victorian etiquette. There is also an aged retainer, Old Adam Goodheart (who transforms to almost Frankenstinian weirdness); a scary female, “Mad Margaret”; supporting characters; a backstory of a previous bad baronet whose fiancee left him when she found his guilty secret, and a whole set of forebears whose pictures come to life in one of the most notable scenes of the show.
Jo Davies had the idea of bringing the time frame into the 1920s and presenting the story in the manner of a silent film: which allows for the backstory to be explained during the overture but otherwise doesn’t alter much of the original (apart from the costumes, which include a World War I general’s uniform for the immediate late baronet; he obviously had plenty of sins on his record).
W S Gilbert’s writing, in dialogue and songs, is so clever that it’s a pleasure to be able to read the words on side-screens as they’re being spoken or sung, and Sullivan’s music is among the best he wrote. The tender duet, “There grew a little flower” near the end, captures the sense of pathos, both comic and moving, that Sullivan could do so well and was to be developed later in the close of The Yeomen of the Guard.
Remarkably, two of the leading roles are taken by the actor-singers who created them just over 14 years ago: Amy Freston as Rose Maybud, and Steven Page as the late-deceased baronet. Her singing voice is as pure and winsome as ever: I first heard it when she was at Central School of Ballet, before turning to training at the Royal Northern College of Music (oddly enough, in something by Sullivan – Orpheus and his Lute), and her dance training comes in very handy in a show such as this (the lively and often hilarious choreography is by Kay Shepherd). His performance is also every bit as good as before.
Several roles are taken by the highly versatile members of the Chorus of Opera North (Claire Pascoe as Dame Hannah, Gillene Butterfield as Zorah, and Helen Evora as the very crazy Mad Margaret), as well as Amy Freston, but those outside, who are new to theirs, are four male singers of undoubted quality, and all having a whale of a time. Henry Waddington adds Old Adam Goodheart to his brilliant Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which Opera North is also touring); John Savournin, a great G&S specialist, is inimitably Sir Despard Murgatroyd, the would-be bad baronet who has to turn respectable when it’s found that he’s not the bearer of the curse after all (instead, he and an only slightly sane Mad Margaret, decide to devote themselves to running a Church of England school in Basingstoke).
And the show reveals two fresh-voiced young singers, Dominic Sedgwick as Robin Oakapple and Xavier Hetherington as his love rival (and supposed brother), Richard Dauntless – who seems a noble sailor on the lines of HMS Pinafore’s Ralph Rackstraw, but is really a bit of a cad. The latter a tricky role to take on because of the upturned expectation, but he sings it forcefully and is just a bit too much of a lad to be a real hero.
The dialogue is carefully paced, to get the convolutions of the plot across, in James Hurley's revival of the direction, and likewise the music is often nicely relaxed under Anthony Kraus’s baton – but fast and furious in the patter numbers, which everyone always enjoys.
