Patience, Part 2

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 386, 15 November 1946, Page 15

Patience, Part 2

a recent Monday from 2YD we were privileged to hear excerpts from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience, beginning, strangely enough, at Act 2. So we are plunged more or less straightway into Jane’s "Silvered is the Raven Hair," that song which leads more colour than any other to the theory (or is it a proven fact?) that Gilbert was no gentleman Poor Jane certainly seems the most conspicuously ill-treated of Gilbertian female heavyweights. The rich attorney’s "elderly ugly daughter" of Trial by Jury is suffered to fade inconspicuously away at the close of the song that enshrines her, Ruth is permitted the comfort of thinking herself a fine woman, Katisha cannot be merely a figure of fun or even "a ruin that’s romantic" after Gilbert has put into her mouth words as emotionally authentic as : Hearts do not break! They sting and ache For old love’s sake. Jane is the only one forced to reveal to the audience the pitiful secrets of her toilet, and to suffer the final ignominy of being chosen in marriage as compensation for her misfortune in being "distinctly plain." Gilbert’s tilting at the unlovely may not be edifying, but the matrix of nonsensicality should insulate

his jibes from his audience. It seems far more likely that elderly roués squirm at King Henry’s pitiless exposure of Falstaff .than that elderly women with embonpoint should be touché by Jane’s "There will be too much of me In the coming-by and by."