Ruddigore – Gilbert & Sullivan

Reviews
TAM Shines with Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘Ruddigore’
Gilbert and Sullivan satire: Ruddigore at Monmouth delivers barbs, banter

From the Director

Most of Gilbert’s plays involve some political mockery (Queen Victoria was not amused). Ruddigore casts a wry glance at the British Navy but its main target is theatrical melodrama: Goodness and Wickedness for Dummies. Gilbert’s own life had moments of melodrama: at two, in 1835, he was kidnapped and his parents paid 25 Pounds Sterling to get him back; and in 1911 at 72 he was drowned, trying to rescue a young woman swimming beyond her depth. Between those unlikely events he lived a sober Victorian, then Edwardian, gentleman’s life, and for years was a successful librettist, humorist—and a bit of a misanthrope. The tart-to-sour sting of his humor gets wonderfully balanced by the sherbet of Sullivan’s music. If you are curious about those two, check out the fine, odd film, Topsy Turvy. It’s film with more careful accuracy than most.

And a little something about words…

“Strike” in theater is the closing clean-up; in a union shop it’s work stoppage in quest of fairness; in British naval jargon and in Ruddigore it means to surrender, lower one’s flag, “strike one’s colours.” Also, “bloody” in Queen Victoria’s world passed for inadmissibly obscene. A mere echo of that adjective in the title Ruddigore shocked some—the disapproving stir helped ticket sales. And “taradiddle?” It breached etiquette to speak of “a lie;” so the era came up with a string of
euphemisms—a “stretcher,” “playing a false fiddle,” a “story,” and a “taradiddle!”