Victorian Set-pieces

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 933, 28 June 1957, Page 15

Victorian Set-pieces

HAVE listened to two episodes of the BBC chronicle of the lives of Gilbert and Sullivan, which take one as far as Pinafore. And I am reluctantly forced to conclude that G and S, for all the temptations which may draw biographers to them, do not hold in their lives the stuff from which lively drama can be made. I recall the disappointing film, which failed to generate any creative feeling for them as persons. The truth is, surely, that both were pillars of Victorian respectability, and there is nothing dramatic about that. Gilbert’s satire, though edged to the point that Queen Victoria refused him a knighthood throughout her reign, is, for all its finish, minuscule, compared with a sreally ferocious talent like Dickens’s, and Sullivan, for all his technical skill and piquant talent, is very small beer beside his European contemporaries. Separately, they were undistinguished, together unique, and it is the baffling fact to which biographers should cling, for the drama of their partnership lies in it. Perhaps I am judging too early in the series, but so far I find them dull coves. There was, however, one delicious vignette in the best Victorian style, where Sullivan’s high-minded fiancée abjures their troth for the sake of his career. As mannered as a piece of petit-point, almost Wildean in its bathos, the episode left me hoping for more like it. I shall therefore listen

again.

B.E.G.

M.