Gilbert & Sullivan in Winchelsea

A scene from "Patience" produced by the Winchelsea Singers

I received a call from a cousin of mine a couple of weeks ago, asking whether we would come to a production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Patience in Winchelsea Village Hall.  This didn't augur well. I greatly enjoyed monthly play-reading evenings organised by some veterans of am.dram when we were in France, but have been subjected to enough wooden acting and poor diction in am.dram productions both here and in France to put me off in a major way.  However, my cousin is dear to me and naturally we agreed to go along.

My forebodings were increased by a performance of Madam Butterfly by Opera South East at the White Rock Theatre in Hastings, after we'd agreed to go to Winchelsea.  I vowed that I wouldn't write a review of the production, since it would be unkind to people who were doing their best.  Suffice it to say that we left at the interval.  

The production of Patience started with a number of handicaps.  The main one was the prominent part  played by a chorus of twenty "love-sick maidens" who could not be fitted on the diminutive stage.  A subsidiary problem was the fact that a number of the lovesick maidens were not in the first flush of youth - my dear cousin has just celebrated her 90th birthday and another much-loved cousin in the chorus is in her eighties.  Both redoubtable ladies of fine voices, but perhaps not entirely maidens.  

The solution found was for the said maidens to be seated in front of the stage, with their soloist members on the stage above them.  In practice it worked well.  To beef up the soloists, some members of Battle Light Opera were imported.  The village hall piano was wheeled into action, a backdrop painted and a bench moved onto the stage, and hey presto we were ready.

The great thing about Gilbert & Sullivan is that it is sufficiently lighthearted for it not to matter if the performance is not of Grade A category.  The dialogue and libretto are fun, and you're swept along by the good-humoured nonsense of it all.  A certain amount of playing to the gallery and ad-libbing went down well, and it all added to the enjoyment when the wig worn by one of the male leads proved a little mobile.  "Just a piece of fun", my cousin had said.  And she was entirely right.

Antony Mair