The Mikado (Coliseum)
Ingenius parody
Michael Tanner
Ifeel like a very late arrival at a party, though one that is fortunately still in full swing. I have just seen for the first time The Mikado in Jonathan Miller's famous production of 1986, revived by David Ritch. My antipathy to G&S is such that I haven't felt it fair to write a report on a performance of any of their collaborations, but this production has such independent fame that I thought I should give it a try, and to my amazement and the incredulity of my friends I thoroughly enjoyed it, though I can see how I might have enjoyed it even more if some of the performers had finer voices. It's nothing like as bad as the old days — since I went I've been sampling D'Oyly Carte's efforts on Decca, and can hardly believe that anyone ever got pleasure from such pinched, parched tones, with the occasional singer such as Valerie Masterson as Yum-Yum to make the efforts of the rest sound even more painful; and the conducting of dedicated G&S men seems to be of appalling four-squareness. At the Coliseum Mark Shanahan is superbly spirited and fluid, and when Alex Ingram takes over later in a run which extends into the remote future things will be just as secure.
The first virtue of a singer of the piece is to get the words across, and the whole cast come through this test with flying colours — one wishes that most of the performers in the other ENO works this season could be forced to go and listen. But if this verbal clarity were at the expense of musical line, where it exists, and pleasing vocal colour, it would show that something was wrong. Fortunately the star of the show demonstrates that a rich, indeed sumptuous voice and the capacity to sustain a long line are compatible with ideal elocution.
Frances McCafferty has long been one of my favourite comic and character singers, and in the role of Katisha, Nanki-Poo's elderly and unwelcome suitor, she surpasses herself. Her comic timing is something any actor might learn from; she parades her vastness, is unselfconscious about it, and yet astonishingly agile, darting around the stage in a way that is as amusing in itself as it is relevant to the course of the action; and her fruity voice conveys as many innuendoes as Gilbert offers her, and then some, while being — though it is hard to abstract it from its overflowing context — beautiful in itself. She is, as anyone who has seen Opera North's Falstaff knows, the leading Mistress Quickly of our time, and she should certainly be an international celebrity. Abstracting again, I would say that her finest single attribute is her face, capable of expressing a limitless range of staggered reactions to obdurate reality. She is a comedian of genius, and would be worth several visits to The Mikado.
As with all the best performers, McCafferty manages not to upstage her colleagues, several of whom are eminently upstageable. Ko-Ko, Katisha's eventual, reluctant husband, is capably taken by Richard Suart. The list of potential victims is updated in the best tradition, and fairly witty; but the genial mirth it draws forth from what I guess to be an audience also steeped in tradition shows one of the fundamental flaws of Gilbertian wit. The programme note quotes Chesterton writing that 'Gilbert pursued and persecuted the evils of modern England till they had literally [sic] not a leg to stand on, exactly as Swift did under the allegory of Go/liver's Trine's.' That seems to me a flabbergasting misjudgment on that shrewd writer's part, for while the best parts of Gulliver, and many other things of Swift's, almost annihilate their targets, Gilbert always betrays a smiling tolerance of them, as if they merely add to the enjoyable variety of life. Compare Offenbach at his most lethal, and the inoffensiveness of G&S is shown to be not only complicit in the social evils it pretends to criticise, but much less amusing too.
That may or may not be closely related to the other, most conspicuous, lack in G&S, but clearly they felt that love was best presented as if it has no straightforward physical expression, or for that matter as if the erotic is musically taboo. Their characters don't exist below the waist, and the hero and heroine, taken by Bonaventura Bottone and Alison Roddy, weren't inclined to extend their roles downwards. Both of them were on reedy form, ensuring that love for them meant nothing more than sighs and giggles. Miller sees all this, I'm sure, and therefore produces not so much The Mikado as a perspective on it, with enjoyably vertiginous shifts between the parodies in the work and the parody of the work which his ingenuity has devised.
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