19th March 2000

WE ARE THE CREW OF THE PINAFORE

FROM the sidelines it seemed the world had gone topsy-turvy. Perched on a dwarfish primary school chair, I tried to make sense of it all. At first there had been little more than the murmuring of small gossiping groups scattered round the edges of the hall, but then, a rumble, a few shouts, a chord struck on a piano, and within seconds it had started. Chaos had taken hold. In the right-hand corner, men, all wearing straw hats, fought for Plasticine meat, a rubber chicken, "salt and tabaccy and excellent jacky", from a character called Buttercup. Union Jacks? I have never seen so many in one place in Scotland. Meanwhile, on the left a woman stood on a chair, surrounded by a circle of women, whose hands shot up when she asked them: "Do I have six giggling girls?" A man barked orders from his seat at the piano. And then, in the centre, as if from nowhere, a dance, and the singing began...

Gaily...

Tripping...

Lightly...

Skipping...

Only, as far as I could see, there was more tripping than there was skipping – particularly when it came to the men. And if it wasn’t for the fact that the bodies hurtling round the room were, on the whole, far from youthful, you would think that here in the middle of it all was a teacher scrabbling for control, and there, in the corner, a couple of classroom assistants gossiping, while all around a playground full of children shouted and ran. Somehow I had imagined a Gilbert and Sullivan rehearsal would be a little more restrained.

What was going on? This was a far cry from sitting in a cinema theatre munching popcorn and dropping off to Mike Leigh’s multi-Oscar nominated Gilbert and Sullivan film Topsy-Turvy, as I had done the night before. This was the stark reality of muscles pumping, voices straining and everyday people throwing themselves at a set of words and music, just for kicks (either that or as a ticket to drinks down the pub afterwards). This was amateur. This was the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Edinburgh in its full glory – all 60 members of it. As one said: "We’re just loafing about, having a laugh."

Now I thought I had found my answer. "What makes anyone want to do Gilbert and Sullivan?" I had asked my mother who had done a few stints in a G&S chorus. "It’s like caravaning, dear," she had said. Or like sailing, for that matter. "A world of its own. Not everyone can understand it, but those who do get really into it."

I had had an idea of what they were supposed to be like, the Gilbert and Sullivan society members. I could have drawn a photofit: white, middle-class, middle-aged, slightly overweight, with an anorakishly extensive knowledge of the life and times of WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. The president of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society had agreed to let me in to one – just two weeks before opening night. By phone he had even treated me to an energetic lecture on the problems of getting young people into G&S these days, and why it was so sad that people only come to the shows they know. The turn-out for their production of the little-staged Ivanhoe, the duo’s one grand opera, had been poor last year. Nobody knew the tunes… and that is all people want, familiar tunes. HMS Pinafore will be a different matter.

I agreed. Even I know Pinafore. And I was fast learning a lot more about Gilbert and Sullivan. I was learning, for instance to say "G&S". Like "G&T", with that whiff of empire about it. Or like "M&S", with that aura of a British institution struggling to escape the clutches of its own nerdiness. Or like "S&M", with that… well, maybe not. Once you have got a reputation it is hard to escape it and the G&S image is more than a little Victorian and prim. In fact there is something so English about this whole G&S business, with its lines like "For he is an Englishman" – at the end of this version of Pinafore there is even a chorus of ‘Rule Britannia’ – that I cannot help wondering why, as I have already been told, Edinburgh has one of the liveliest Gilbert and Sullivan scenes in Britain.

Four companies it seems, all performing light opera, all with their shows within weeks of each other. What makes Scots turn out to play at Union Jack waving? I would find out.

When I arrived at Craiglockhart Primary School on a drizzling Monday evening, a prickly whitening beard, portly belly and anxious smile greeted me. Alan Hogg. In his everyday life he is just an average artificial hip and limb salesman. In the G&S world, he is president. Which is probably why he spent half his time frantically running from person to person, working the floor. Hogg introduced me to David Lyle, camp but tough musical director by night, police officer by day. ("The beauty of being amateur is we choose what we want to do. I do it just as a hobby. Because it’s a pleasure.") Then on to Jacquie Bruce, nurse and chorus member. ("We’re just stotting on like prissy women. We have a bit of a laugh – lots of singing and what not.") Then Norma Macdonald, teacher and vice-president. ("I’ve been here, yes, nine years. I shall be president next year for my sins. It is quite a task.") But not to Alan Borthwick, the director. He, it turned out, wasn’t coming. Instead, he was appearing in a production of The Merry Widow at the King’s Theatre: for the Southern Light, a rival company. No sense of betrayal, though. This is a common occurrence. Lyle has been left in charge for the night – and he’s clearly enjoying it.

Hogg was muttering to me about the budget, one of the problems which preoccupies him. "It’s £41,000. I mean 15 years ago it would probably have been about £10,000 but all of a sudden the cost of the King’s and everything has gone through the roof. And I know the Bohemian, Southern Light and ourselves all have a budget of about the same." The King’s Theatre costs £17,000 to hire, with the orchestra, costumes and props the other major expenses.

So the society only does one show a year? "We can’t do more than one a year," he says. "We have six months of rehearsals. This is seen as a winter hobby. And people don’t go to the theatre in the summer. This was one of the problems when HMS Pinafore first came out. It nearly fell on its face. Because it was first produced in London, in the middle of the summer and it was a heatwave… The show was virtually about to close. But then Sullivan started playing the music in a proms concert and people started thinking: ‘Hey this is great music,’ and HMS Pinafore suddenly started to come to life again.

"They were selling something like 10,000 sheets of music a day at one point. In New York at one time there were eight theatres within five blocks of each other all doing Pinafore. It was the Beatles of the day. The... what do you call those girls?"

"Spice Girls?"

"Yes, yes. The Spice Girls."

A wave from the prop lady, and Hogg wandered off to sort out the costumes. Now I was on my own and it felt like I was a new kid on the first day at school. All across the hall little swarms of people had formed. I strolled over to the youngest and best-looking group of men, three of them.

Hi, what are you doing?

They eyed me up warily.

"We’re in the chorus." (Chorus.)

Already I got the feeling they were not going to take me on as their new best friend. They muttered about the number of years they have been doing it. Four years, said one. Five or six, said another. Fifteen said the oldest. One of them, the more animated, was a physics teacher. The other two are software engineers, "I’m afraid." (Chorus.)

A woman came round with straw hats for them to wear. The men eyed them up cautiously. Conversation was becoming increasingly hard work and revolved around the shallowness and depth of the hats, so I left them to it. I’d heard that Gilbert and Sullivan societies can be seething pits of bitchiness and back-stabbing, but as yet I’d seen no evidence. There had been the odd comment here and there. "I’m pretty fed up with G&S," said one cast member. "Though I wouldn’t want them to know it." But it was all harmless and the cast seemed to divide into those with an unwavering loyalty to the duo and those who 30 or 40 productions down the line have had just about enough of a good thing.

A couple of claps and suddenly everyone was standing to attention. "This is the last stop and start rehearsal," announced Lyle. "One of the things we want to do is make sure that everybody, absolutely everybody, has got the hornpipe step. Many of you can do the step beautifully but can’t sing at the same time. Some of you can sing beautifully but can’t do the steps. So tonight we’re going try to make sure that works.

"We want to check the men’s moves. Specifically the locks. Because the whole ethos of this show, with the men’s chorus is that they act as one. The women are individuals but the men act in unison. They all salute at the same time. They all do this at the same time. It’s meant to be rhythmical and drilled. And if you go into these locks and you get there and people are shifting around, it’s so obvious that it’s not working."

Amateur men dancing in unison? This I wanted to see. Though, it wasn’t until later that I got the chance. The locks. The drill. The lumbering steps crashing into each other as bodies flowed in seemingly random directions. The faces rapt in concentration or confusion. "The trouble is they tend to watch the person in front of them, thinking they know what they’re doing," said a female cast member. The only thing is no-one knows. But it wasn’t all chaos. In between there was, "I am the Captain of the Pinafore", "We sail the ocean blue" and many other lyrics and tunes that floated me along till I became convinced that the singing was magic. In the middle of Ian Lawson’s blustering solo as Sir Joseph Porter, who "polished that handle so carefullee, that now he is the ruler of the Queen’s navy", I felt the creeping beginnings of a small conversion.

I was soon enthralled by the hammy facial expressions of the Boatswain, whose eyes seemed to expand out of his head. Tunes that I had forgotten I remembered were making me want to laugh, sing along or dance. By Buttercup’s ‘Baby Farming’, I was in a state of excitement. And, by the end, ‘Rule Britannia’ didn’t seem like such a bad idea, and at least I knew the lyrics. There might have been a few left feet in the production, but as far as I could tell those voices were good. And the songs... they were funny. WS Gilbert, after all, was famous for his wit.

As the night went on, I felt I was beginning to get the picture. "We’re just like one big happy family," Jacquie Bruce had said when I first arrived. Little did I know how true it was. Throughout the evening, there was a constant refrain of my wife, my son, my husband, my sister. It seems if you are not the son or daughter of a G&S member, then you are probably the wife or husband of one, and if you are not that, you probably soon will be. Roland York, who plays Captain Deadeye, informed me that he had met his wife 36 years ago while playing Captain Corcoran in HMS Pinafore at Edinburgh University Savoy Opera Group. "At their 30th birthday party, the president at the time said: ‘Will you all put your hands up who met their partner and married here.’ A forest of hands shot up. And our daughter joined the Savoy Opera. She was the first of the Savoy babies. There have been subsequent ones that have been babies of babies."

Once a G&Ser always a G&Ser. As a species, they are obsessive. Some of them appear to live and breathe it 24 hours a day – while still holding down a full-time job. Director Alan Borthwick’s two daughters were there, singing in the chorus, with their partners. "You should see dad at home," said one of them. "He maps out the choreography using blocks of wood. It’s like a military operation." Even the rehearsal itself was consuming, one intense marathon of singing and dancing and pacing, with only a break of about 30 seconds in the middle to catch breath.

Even then, there were announcements to be made. "I need mops," said the props lady, "the ones with the stringy bottoms." At this point I wandered over to a group gathered round a table. They were studying the flyer for the show. There was much consternation. A serious drama, perhaps. What was wrong, I asked. "The rigging on the ship in the drawing is the wrong way round."

More than anything else, however, it was the laughter that got me. Little pockets of it seemed to erupt all over the room. That’s the joy of being amateur. And amateur is what G&S is all about. As it happens, the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company (which staged the original Gilbert and Sullivan shows) are putting on a nifty professional production of HMS Pinafore down in London. But to get the real experience what you want is a bunch of doctors, lawyers and chartered accountants lumbering about the stage in ill-fitting sailor costumes, crashing into each other. It is only right, after all, that it is amateur. Gilbert and Sullivan in their early days, so much hated the over-mannered style of Victorian stage acting, they used non-professionals in their productions.

No visit to an amateur rehearsal is complete, of course, without that post-rehearsal pint, so I joined the cast in the pub. Gossip was the order of the day: other operatic companies, who is doing what and how much money they are making. All this was fine, but when we moved on to a discussion of the dimensions of the HMS Victory (on which their Pinafore is based), I felt my eyelids start to droop. I began to wonder if I was cut out for this G&S business. Even watching it is exhausting. I had fallen asleep in Topsy-Turvy and now as we came back round to the question of rigging, I was in danger of dropping off again. It was all starting to sound a little surreal, all going a little topsy-turvy again. The length of the decks? The masts? But then, as a critic writes in Mike Leigh’s film, WS Gilbert is the ‘monarch of topsy-turvydom’. n

HMS Pinafore is playing at King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, (0131-529 6000) from Tuesday to Saturday

VICKY ALLAN