WE ARE GOING TO ABOLISH IT IN ENGLAND:
Gilbert Today and Tomorrow.

[This is the text of a paper presented to the semi-academic symposium at the Buxton International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, 28th July 1999.]

I hope we can broadly agree that there is a crisis in Gilbert and Sullivan at the moment. Audiences are dropping off, and the average age of the membership of the amateur societies is certainly increasing with every year. The D'Oyly Carte survives, but only just by the skin of its teeth. Yes, of course there is a crisis.

Yet Ian Bradley has written as recently as 1996 - in his Introduction to The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan - assuming that the operas' popularity continues to grow. He asks: "What are the reasons for the enduring popularity of the Savoy Operas?" He pinpoints "the nostalgia factor" as the most important: he writes: "Half the charm of the Savoy Operas is that they are so dated. They seem to breathe the innocence, the naivety and the fun of a long-vanished age. Even when they were written, of course, they had a strong element of pure escapism with their fantastic topsy-turvy settings and plots." (p vii) It's true that a little later he does mention Sullivan's music as a possible extra factor, but he is noticeably less enthusiastic about what he calls Gilbert's "dated" words.

I believe this view involves a basic misunderstanding of Gilbert's words. Naive, escapist, and dated?... Well, I can argue over those terms some other time. For the moment let us simply notice that Ian Bradley seems to be identifying these qualities as reasons for the operas' continuing popularity. It is very easy to imagine other people seeing them as obvious causes of the crisis in Gilbert and Sullivan.

It is certainly assumed by many that Gilbert and Sullivan opera can only survive through the next century by remaining in some sense "relevant" to its potential audience. And I, too, believe that the only way any work of art can survive as a living thing is by retaining some kind of relevance to its culture. So in this paper I intend to discuss a little this question of whether Gilbert's words are still relevant today, and whether they stand any chance of remaining relevant tomorrow.

Incidentally, I shall set to one side the attempts of some directors to thrust relevance upon the operas, by forcible updating, rewriting and so on. Any writer can be bodged up to suit the tastes of another age - even Basil Hood or F.C. Burnand. If we are to judge Gilbert's continuing relevance, we must stick with annoying pedantry to the words of Gilbert himself, and not allow the issue to be clouded by the interpolations of later hands.

The obvious place to start is with Gilbert's satire. It is the element which at first sight seems the most clearly short-lived, but it is also the element which keeps striking successive generations with its ever-renewed meaning. The reason for this has frequently been pointed out: Gilbert's satire did not stop with the surface, perishable elements of what he ridiculed - he mocked their underlying motives and philosophies, the things which are carried on from age to age. Thus the satire in Patience did not become incomprehensible as soon as Aestheticism had had its day, but remained fresh because the real target is not Aestheticism at all but the desire of men to be admired by women, and their willingness to use all the weapons of fashion to achieve that end.

There are topical jokes in the operas, jokes which perished almost as soon as the first night was over - the Captain Shaw reference in Iolanthe is an obvious case, but there are dozens of examples of what I mean. Explaining the jokes in the Savoy operas has turned into what amounts to a cottage industry. Well, no doubt it's useful to have some of these things explained in programme notes, but my view is that the average audience isn't so bothered about the occasional reference which it can't understand - and, yes, I do believe these things crop up in the operas only occasionally. It's one of the hazards of going to see a piece of theatre which is over a hundred years old.

We can say that the joke in Private Willis's song about Liberals and Conservatives has lost its point here in Britain now; but the summary of the House of Commons which he makes in the second verse is still as pointed as it ever was:

When in that House MPs divide,
If they've a brain and cerebellum, too,
They've got to leave that brain outside,
And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to.
But then the prospect of a lot
Of dull MPs in close proximity,
All thinking for themselves, is what
No man can face with equanimity.

I'm open to correction, but I suspect those lines apply equally well to practically every political system in the world.

Private Willis wondering whether MPs are better being yes-men or trying to use their brains; Bunthorne confessing that he can't live without admiration; Sir Joseph Porter insisting that a British sailor is any man's equal excepting his, and Pooh-Bah reinventing Civil Service rules at every insult - these are the satirical touches which strike home unexpectedly even today. The bitter satire in Utopia, Limited is more uneven, but when King Paramount sings that in his happy country "poverty is obsolete and hunger is abolished", and the Flowers of Progress can only sigh, "We are going to abolish it in England" - why, then surely we may suspect that even that ramshackle opera retains a few barbs which are capable of wounding.

But it must be admitted that to defend Gilbert's relevance on the issue of his satire is to retreat to our weakest position. Liberals are no longer a political force in Britain; there are no Pocket Boroughs any more - only Safe Seats; and not even the House of Lords is eternal. In the 1980s we suddenly discovered that Utopia, Limited was a satire on Thatcherism - but Thatcherism is dead. Iolanthe now looks like an uncanny prediction of the government of Strephon Blair; yet even Blair will go the way of all flesh, in time. Place too much emphasis on these strange satirical predictions and in five years, ten years, G&S may seem old hat again and we shall be back where we started.

All satire is a little cold; it is hard to get enthusiastic about even the cleverest ridicule of a political idea, even when it takes the attractive form of laughing at politicians. What is it in a work of art that carries it forward into other ages? This may not be a definitive answer, but for the moment let me suggest it is the human things - character, emotion and, yes!, love - which endure, and engage an audience. It doesn't matter if we're talking about the 1870s or the 1990s - these are the things which draw an audience into a theatrical work and hold its attention. All the author's skill is then needed to keep the audience interested in these basic themes throughout the span of an evening.

People rarely think of Gilbert's works as being particularly strong when it comes to characterisation or emotion - but the fact is that the best G&S operas have lived in the popular imagination for over a hundred years, and Gilbert has been at least as important a factor in this achievement as Sullivan. The Mikado has been updated, rewritten and transformed in any number of ways - and why? Because it is a funny, human story - full of light and yet not hiding the very dark shadows which any strong light must also create.

It is a very romantic story, this story of the heir of the throne of Japan who disguises himself as a Second Trombone to escape a loveless marriage and is prepared to risk everything (almost) for the sake of the woman he loves. But it is also a story of cruelty, and of death in any number of ways - by hanging, beheading, burial alive, by something humorous but lingering with either boiling oil or melted lead. Death hangs over all the opera's major characters - it is something of an achievement that despite this The Mikado is seen as such a sunny and cheerful work.

Part of the opera's secret lies in the constant repetition of a philosophy of Carpe Diem - this may be a world of trouble, sadness set to song, A may be happy and B not, virtue may be triumphant only in theatrical performances, the night may come too soon - and yet there are, after all, years and years of afternoon, the flowers that bloom in the spring do breathe promise of merry sunshine, pleasures do come if sorrows follow, and when all's said and done, we can be reconciled even to the world's darker side, for there is beauty in the bellow of the blast!

And here we do have something fundamental which augurs well for the future of Gilbert and Sullivan. How many comic operas are there which have the honesty to admit that virtue is indeed triumphant only in theatrical performances? It is that insistence on the uncomfortable realities which gives Gilbert's best works their firm foundation. They are more than mere sentimental cloud-castles; there is always at least a suspicion of bitterness in Gilbert - which must not be confused with mere cynicism.

We live in an age which is simply unable to take the old simplistic sentimentalities at face value. Is it possible today to enjoy Basil Hood's libretto for Merrie England in the same spirit in which it was originally enjoyed? This I doubt. But in Gilbert's Yeomen of the Guard there is no Maypole-dancing or May Queen, no Sir Walter Raleigh or Good Queen Bess - and while he does romanticise the late middle ages a little, the world he portrays is a world in which mobs threaten to throw strolling players into the river, a world of casual corruption and precarious existence. No, Gilbert's England is not Merrie.

We who look back on this traumatic, fragmented century of ours with any honesty surely have no excuse for calling Gilbert's view of life unduly sour or cynical. He sees the hidden core of selfishness which is in all human beings and he brings it to the surface for our amusement. He sees greed and self-interest as the main motivating factors in human life. But - he is not cynical. He does not view human beings as contemptible, but simply as absurd. For we are absurd, aren't we? - sitting in this room, listening to each other airing our pet theories about the works of two long-dead Englishmen. Well, since everyone is absurd - you, me, Sullivan, Carte, Gilbert - the only sane reaction is surely to laugh, as Gilbert makes us laugh - not at humanity, but with it, since we are humanity. That is the hidden message of all Gilbert's philosophical lyrics such as the ones from The Mikado which I have already quoted. Life's a pleasant institution - let us take it as it comes!

Gilbert's world, that crazy ironical topsy-turvy yet right-way-up vision of things, that mixture of sweet and sour, is also in large part our world as we see it today. It is a world informed by a disillusioned, satirical viewpoint. Our cultural outlook has never been the same since the Satire Boom of the 1960s. We have passed through Tom Lehrer and Monty Python, the Goon Show and Beyond the Fringe, Spitting Image and Saturday Night Live, and we have emerged, bruised, bitter but wiser, and when someone says proudly "if there is an institution in Great Britain which is not susceptible of any improvement at all, it is the House of Peers!", we are perhaps less likely than before to take it at face value.

We are informed by irony, but many of us are also jaded by it. We know that nothing can come of mere destructive sneers which are nothing more than that. When we go to experience a work of art, we are not satisfied to be told that all our achievements are nothing but dust and that there is no future for the human race. There must be a little life and hope in it. And, yes, Gilbert does provide it. For all his characters' selfishness and self-importance, there is always something which takes them out of self and establishes a connection between them. It's impolite to mention it, but I'm sorry, it's quite true - it is love which saves them - Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum, Strephon and Phyllis, Ralph Rackstraw and Josephine. Even poor old Jack Point, for all his self-pity, has something a little divine in him because for a few moments he cared for something apart from his terrible old jokes.

Sentimental? So it's sentimental. Some previous writers have been disappointed to find Gilbert refusing to go all the way to destructive despair, but instead taking refuge in what they consider an unforgivable inconsistency. Hesketh Pearson wrote in his Gilbert and Sullivan (p108): "Again and again, at the bidding of some powerful intuition, he exposed a social or national absurdity, but as often as not he failed to see the point of his exposure and fell back upon a piece of conventional claptrap which was equally typical of him."

These two halves of Gilbert's philosophy are certainly inconsistent. If we believe the old idea of Gilbert the thought-machine, the inhuman man of logic, it is outrageous to see cynicism and sentimentality coexisting like this. But this was not a shortcoming in Gilbert but a strength. As Oscar Wilde observed, a Truth in Art is that whose contradictory is also true. Thus in HMS Pinafore all the satire is against the idea of love levelling all ranks, but the opera's emotional core is all for it - and it is this emotional core which carries the day. The strength of Gilbert's satire comes from this creative tension between opposites - in Pinafore, between the god of love and the god of reason, and elsewhere between rebellion and conformity, between scoffing at a thing and celebrating it. (I'm thinking of the song "He is an Englishman" here, that wonderful song which is both a mockery of patriotism and also, in its way, a fine example of the real thing.) He could only communicate his vision by finding a way of saying two opposite things at the same time - and do we really need to ask why he used irony so extensively, and why he invented the realm of Topsyturvydom?

Gilbert's vision will survive insofar as it speaks to us, and I say that his odd balance of irony and sincerity speaks to our age directly. If this is true, then the Savoy operas don't need to be "made relevant" - they're relevant already. They are so much in tune with their audience that they can make their point even when the director has decided to give a helping hand. According to this view of things, Gilbert is a writer whose time has at last come. It may be that we are at last ready to see such of his works as Engaged, Tom Cobb and A Sensation Novel. But that is a harangue for another occasion.

[Pause.]

And yet the fact remains: there is a crisis in Gilbert and Sullivan. So if everything I have been telling you is true - and on the whole I believe it is - then why are we in crisis?

Let me suggest that it is because Gilbert and Sullivan opera has a serious image problem. By and large the broad public sees G&S as something very bland, unchallenging, and - yes - "irrelevant". It is par excellence the culture of the old ascendant middle class. As such it has sought to uphold certain values which were considered a valuable legacy from our national past.

The historian David Cannadine, in an essay on Gilbert and Sullivan printed in the book Myths of the English (1992) describes the operas as "a paean of praise to national pride and to the established order" (p19), and insists that they are characterised by a "determined refusal to address social problems", "light-hearted escapism", and an "inability to take foreigners seriously" (p28). I believe he is very wrong to take these things as being a true description of the operas - but they are certainly a true description of their image.

I have already outlined some of the aspects of the operas which I think we would do well to emphasise to the world. The operas are satirical; the operas have an edge; the operas criticise and mock. They are also in parts humane and romantic and optimistic.

If we respect the text and find the immediacy of what is in it - the emotions and ideas which hit us between the eyes - then we shall be half-way to solving the crisis. If we can communicate to the general public that G&S is full of that immediacy, we shall have travelled the rest of the way out of the Valley of Crisis. It sounds easy enough; so long as no one pesters me with awkward questions about how, in practical terms, to achieve these ends, I can sit back, happy in the knowledge that I have made my case logical and complete.

But this is not quite the end of what I want to say. I believe all the foregoing - and yet I also believe something else, which completely contradicts it. For, after all, a truth in criticism is also that whose contradictory is also true. Let me stand up beside myself, so to speak, and deliver a mocking and pessimistic rebuttal of everything I have just said.

The fact is that the Savoy operas are irredeemably middle-class creations. They were created for an essentially middle-class audience, and the base of their support has always been middle-class. Their outlook is middle-class; their concerns and taboos - all middle-class. This would be fine, except that I look around me at the world we live in and I see that the middle class is

no longer the all-conquering force it has been for so long. There is another class emerging which I believe threatens the middle class - yes, and even threatens the future of Gilbert and Sullivan opera itself. There is no name for this new class, but if I describe it perhaps you will recognise it. Its morality is entirely pragmatic. It has no understanding of a morality based on anything other than the concepts of harm and enjoyment. It has no taboos about sex or drugs; its guiding force is nature - like Dick Dauntless, it follows its heart's dictates. As far as I can tell this results in a charming generosity of spirit combined with disturbing flashes of viciousness. Money means nothing in itself; there is no work ethic; there is no belief in God, or at any rate they do not act as if there was a belief in God. The Darwinian revolution has at last reached its natural conclusion - it has created a generation which knows to its marrow that we are animals with nothing of the divine in us.

There is nothing academic or provable in this. I am only telling you what I see with my eyes and with that inner eye which sees the future. I see that these people are the future, and that they threaten everything which we hold dear - civilisation, money, Gilbert and Sullivan. What have they in common with the genteel witticisms which Gilbert has to offer? Not much, I must admit. If this second diagnosis is correct, what can we do about it? Can we make the Savoy operas "relevant" to them? Can we relocate The Mikado among the drug-users of California? Can we recast HMS Pinafore as a parable of promiscuous sex? Or, rather than defacing these works of art in an attempt to pander to a generation we do not understand, maybe we should accept with good grace the extinction of our way of thinking and allow the Savoy operas - not to die, but to go into hibernation for a few generations until some strange future tribe of savages picks among the dust and rediscovers the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore, and amidst the raucous singing suddenly finds itself making another unfamiliar sound - the sound of laughter.

Thank you.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Bradley, Ian (ed.), The complete annotated Gilbert and Sullivan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Cannadine, David. "Gilbert and Sullivan: the making and un-making of a British 'tradition'", in Myths of the English, edited by Roy Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.

Pearson, Hesketh. Gilbert and Sullivan: a biography. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1935.