DOWN WITH GILBERT & SULLIVAN by Keith Parker (slightly abridged) [Article supplied by David Rose, reprinted from a school magazine.]

It is essential that the comic singer in every G & S opera should have three qualities ... a loud voice, a slight paunch and the skin of a rhinoceros, and as a result I have been belting out those dismal choruses since I first started to moult ... I have polished up handles on big brass door [sic], let punishments fit crimes, voted either Liberal or Conservative, and insisted that constabulary duties must be done since I first learned to shout, all with the rictus of a grin on my face and a cold numb ache in the place where my heart used to be. How I hate those funny songs! Shove over, Pagliacci, and make room for a fellow sufferer! If you want to know how big hell is, just measure up the Savoy Theatre. The Savoy Operas are as ubiquitous as Enid Blyton and Coca-Cola. The child who completes an academic career never having been a policeman, pirate, gondolier, fairy or a Japanese courtier is made of sterner stuff than I am. [Or just plain unlucky - as I was. Ed.] Junior schools, comprehensive schools, public schools and universities work through the complete repertoire, and when they have finished they go back to the beginning and start again ... It is difficult to analyse what makes them so popular. The plots are fragile to say the least (there is really only one), and the language is trite and dated. The music, though tenacious, is hardly great, so where lies the appeal? It is undeniable that they do possess some unique magic and that the quarrel over the price of a carpet that brought the partnership of W.S. Gilbert & Sir Arthur Sullivan to an end, also began a very long barren period in the history of the British musical comedy. But a hundred years has brought other partnerships - Lionel Bart and Sean Kenney, Lerner & Lowe - and other musicals - but few of them have had much success in edging past the school monopoly maintained by Gilbert & Sullivan. So be brave. Give Gilbert & Sullivan a touch of the Lord High Executioner, pour encourager les autres, and, like me, swear never to take part in another Savoy Opera, until next year at least.

[I anticipate howls of rage in response to this article, so please put your pens to paper and write authoritatively in language that I can print. I have not met Keith Parker, but no doubt David Rose can convey back to him any important comments I think worth printing in these pages. Ed. In fact there were none!]

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