 and die-hard Gilbert and Sullivan fans than the implications of a story featuring the condemned Colonel Fairfax's last hour in the Tower of London. On the eve of a widely-dreaded funding announcement by Arts Council England, it felt like an unfortunate choice of plot, and so it proved: the axe is falling on ENO as we know it, the company losing all its subsidy and being ordered to move out of London if it wants future funds. Will it survive? Fairfax does, of course, though this comedy is as near to serious opera as G&S gets. He's assisted by his secret admirer Phoebe and her father Sergeant Meryll, who audaciously enlist help from the strolling entertainers Jack Point and Elsie Maynard. Yet even if Yeomen is a little darker than some G&S and more sophisticated musically, there's a lot of dialogue that could have been shortened here, since most of Act I's humour feels leaden. As for the sung numbers, if you need surtitles in G&S, something is wrong. One unarguable thing about the G&S canon is its depressingly steady decline. Devotees will claim that Yeomen was written (1888) at the height of their powers, and it certainly includes such haunting inspirations as the folk-inflected 'I have a song to sing, O'. But the subversive assaults of Trial by Jury and HMS Pinafore had given way to cosy snobbery by the time they got to The Gondoliers, and Yeomen dates from just a year earlier. It's a close-run thing. Lacking a perennially topical device such as The Mikado's Little List, Yeomen struggles to acquire modern resonance. Still, the tea-shoppe nostalgia is well negotiated by the director Jo Davies, although by updating it from Tudor times to the coronation year of 1953 she runs the risk of surrendering to a diff){kind=link}
As the Arts Council withdraws English National Opera’s core funding, ENO delivers a serviceable account of this Gilbert and Sullivan staple
Even by usual first-night standards at English National Opera, a peculiar atmosphere hung over the Coliseum as its new production of The Yeomen of the Guard got underway. It had less to do with the odd mixture of celebrities (courted so assiduously by the company) and die-hard Gilbert and Sullivan fans than the implications of a story featuring the condemned Colonel Fairfax’s last hour in the Tower of London.
On the eve of a widely-dreaded funding announcement by Arts Council England, it felt like an unfortunate choice of plot, and so it proved: the axe is falling on ENO as we know it, the company losing all its subsidy and being ordered to move out of London if it wants future funds. Will it survive?
Fairfax does, of course, though this comedy is as near to serious opera as G&S gets. He’s assisted by his secret admirer Phoebe and her father Sergeant Meryll, who audaciously enlist help from the strolling entertainers Jack Point and Elsie Maynard. Yet even if Yeomen is a little darker than some G&S and more sophisticated musically, there’s a lot of dialogue that could have been shortened here, since most of Act I’s humour feels leaden. As for the sung numbers, if you need surtitles in G&S, something is wrong.
One unarguable thing about the G&S canon is its depressingly steady decline. Devotees will claim that Yeomen was written (1888) at the height of their powers, and it certainly includes such haunting inspirations as the folk-inflected “I have a song to sing, O”. But the subversive assaults of Trial by Jury and HMS Pinafore had given way to cosy snobbery by the time they got to The Gondoliers, and Yeomen dates from just a year earlier. It’s a close-run thing.