Music: Arthur Sullivan
Libretto: W.S. Gilbert
Director: John Savournin
Much as with Shakespeare’s comedies, Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic operettas sometimes struggle with making 21st-century audiences think that they’re actually funny. All too often, any laughter that comes is from a sense of nostalgic whimsy, or a sense that if this was funny when first staged, one must laugh now out of politeness.
Thankfully, Charles Court Opera’s revival of the company’s production of Patience manages to be supremely funny at every turn. Partly that’s due to the source material. Unlike many of WS Gilbert’s other librettos, this operetta is set in his present day, lampooning the then-current fashion of the Aesthetic movement. A style that claimed to love “art for art’s sake,” its proponents could seem fickle, flighty and self-obsessed – attributes which have never gone out of season and remain always ripe for parody.
Simon Bejer’s design replaces the original setting of Bunthorne Castle for The Castle, a pub frequented by emo goths (the “love-sick maidens” of the original, reduced from the original 20 to just three). The eponymous Patience (Catriona Hewitson) is now a barmaid rather than a milkmaid. Still, she remains an ingenue who has yet to fall in love – unlike her customers, who fall in love at every turn.
Director John Savournin tweaks occasional moments in the libretto – Gilbert surely never referenced Frank Sinatra – but otherwise the whole show, accompanied by musical director David Eaton on piano, feels as faithful to the original as a temporally updated production could be. As the lovesick maidens, Meriel Cunningham and Jennie Jacobs are sharply comedic. At the same time, their older compatriot, Catrine Kirkman’s Jane, is afforded additional opportunities for humour, especially in the Act II opener, Silvered is The Raven Hair, demonstrating that obsession about women’s ageing is hardly a new phenomenon.
But the lion’s share of the humour comes from Matthew Kellett’s Reginald Bunthorne, whose faux-Byronic self-regard is over the top in all the best ways. The character’s outrageous behaviour is never allowed to overshadow the other roles on stage, instead bringing them up to his level of absurdity.
That is also nicely offset with Catriona Hewitson’s Patience, a character who can seem to be just a Maguffin in her own titular operetta, there to be a moment of calm in all the comedy swirling around her. Hewitson provides that, to be sure, but she also provides a determined level of self-belief and a calm sense of cynicism to the excesses of her clientele.
That also brings a wonderful sense of romanticism with the introduction of Matthew Siveter’s Archibald, another Aesthete and Patience’s childhood friend. Siveter imbues his character, who finds the inevitable attention from the flighty maidens irritating in the extreme, with a light self-knowledge that makes his and Patience’s mutual attraction all the sweeter, while also playing nicely off Kellett’s self-delusion.
The resulting two hours whirl by, bringing the audience on a journey that is never less than wholly enjoyable. If written today, Patience may have used influencers for its parable of the follies of self-regard – but Charles Court Opera demonstrates that Gilbert & Sullivan’s most contemporary work remains as timeless as ever.
Runs until 13 September 2025
