One star for the set and one for the Lord Chancellor. Otherwise, forget it. Iolanthe is one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most seductive works, magicking finely balanced words and music with perennial wit and wisdom about society’s perceptions and regulations of itself. This is not its finest hour.
The set for this production by the Carl Rosa Opera Company is a properly enchanting children’s pop-up book vision of an Arcadian fairyland: receding cut-out frames of leafy vistas and, later, a misty moonlit Palace of Westminster. The Lord Chancellor is Steven Page, the embodiment of the letter and spirit of G&S law: every focused baritonic note in place, every tongue-twisted word carried, and those twitches of torment in the cheekbones.
But why, oh why does the presence of dialogue make casting directors assume that the singing voice is a secondary requirement? G&S too often now becomes a rest home for clapped-out opera singers, and that simply won’t do.
The show enables Maria Ewing to make her glorious return to the London stage after quite some absence. She is Queen of the Fairies, no less - a far cry from her Carmen, her Salome, her Melisande, yet bearing gruesome traces of all three in her spooky, pouting, faux-erotic black bat of a Titania. The blurred contours of her voice suggest that she is either trying to sound like a Russian aristocrat, or simply attempting to slough off her American accent.
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Iolanthe herself, red-haired and twinkly, but without many consonants that carry, is played by Sophie-Louise Dann. Her son, Strephon (his line, “What’s the good of being half a fairy?” still brings the house down) is also only half a singer. Karl Daymond’s career is fast moving towards the spoken theatre and, unless he was very ill on the first night, his ravaged voice suggests that’s where he should stay.
And the Peers? Bruce Graham and Barry Clark set up a nicely bumbling double-act as the Earl of Mountararat and Earl Tolloller. Their amorous advances to Phyllis (Charlotte Page) are doubtless kindled by her resemblance to Julie Andrews, without quite a large enough spoonful of sugar.
Donald Maxwell’s cameo Private Willis and the choreography of Steve Elias provide momentary distraction from the village-hall theatricals of Peter Mulloy’s direction and the sturdy rumty-tum conducting of Richard Balcombe.
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