The darker side of Gilbert and Sullivan: The Yeomen of the Guard at Holland Park

The Yeomen of the Guard is an altogether darker piece than the Gilbert and Sullivan operas that preceded it. A level of silliness remains, but it’s heavily toned down. Gone is the undiluted good cheer, gone are the unambiguously happy endings; rather, this is a piece about how imperfect is the human condition. Every character is deceitful at some point; several are downright malicious. The bad guys sometimes win. The good guys sometimes win, but only at the cost of compromising their ideals (or, for some, their future happiness). The sharpness of Gilbert’s wit is undimmed and you do laugh, but the laughter has a bitter edge.

“Imperfect” is also a word that can be applied to Charles Court Opera and Opera Holland Park’s production last night. Some good performances made a solid case for the work, but there were things that got in the way. One of these was distinctly avoidable. It’s not uncommon and not unreasonable to have voices amplified for the dialogue and not for the singing, but here, the amplification was so loud that there was a considerable dip in level as soon as a performer switched from spoken word to singing. Worse, there were cases where the amplification came and went mid-speech, with disconcerting effect.

Director John Savournin’s staging is straightforward if underwhelming. Designer Alyson Cummins gives us standard Beefeater costumes and a traditional view of the world that's in keeping with the Shakespearean style of the dialogue. There's reasonable acting from several of the performers as individuals, but with the Holland Park stage set in a narrow ring around the orchestra pit, Savournin finds little room in which to make the stage movement enhance the action.

There was one outstanding and unexpected double act. Llio Evans was unable to sing the main role of Elsie Maynard, but was well enough to walk and mime the role, with Ellie Laugharne brought in at short notice to sing the role from the orchestra pit. Evans acted her character with such gusto that it was hard to believe that this was possible without actually voicing it, while Laugharne was the pick of the evening’s singers, with shimmering high notes, earnest interpretation and the cleanest of diction. Never have I seen an indisposition so brilliantly overcome. The other outstanding piece of singing came from William Morgan as the imprisoned Colonel Fairfax, a brightly ringing tenor voice to make you sit up and take notice.

But it took a while for the performance to shift out of first gear. The overture, considered one of Sullivan’s best, was pleasant enough, but distractions came via a great deal of inconsequential stage movement and the sound from David Eaton and the City of London Sinfonia felt thin; this was one of the rare occasions on which the use of an orchestral reduction seemed very much to the detriment of the piece. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, this being the first of Sullivan’s operas in which he used an orchestra larger than before. The first few entrance arias went by without my feeling any real sense of engagement with the characters, the humour feeling rather dated. 

Matthew Kellett gave a sympathetic account of the unfortunate jester Jack Point (and did some nice capers), although he suffered more than most from the drop in volume from speech to singing. Stephen Gadd and Darren Jeffery gave good interpretations as the men in charge of the Tower, Sir RIchard Cholmondeley and Sergeant Meryll. The performance as a whole began to gel more as the mood darkened. As Act 1 approached its finale, with Fairfax due to be executed within the hour, the orchestral playing gained cogency and the chorus joining in to a fine account of “The pris’ner comes to meet his doom”.

The darker mood persists in Act 2 as it becomes gradually clear that there will be no happy ending; there was some excellent ensemble singing in which I particularly enjoyed the quartet “Strange adventure” which sets up the threatened unravelling of the plot to free Fairfax. Of the three weddings, two are to be involuntary: both Meryll and his daughter Phoebe are marrying to ensure the silence of their spouses. The third, between Fairfax and Elsie, only happens by the bride jilting her former sweetheart Jack. Fittingly, the libretto’s instruction that Jack “falls insensible at their feet” is rendered as him committing suicide; we leave with lumps in our throats.