I am so tired that I feel like an idiot. It is difficult to think and difficult to write anything without feeling that I'm doing it wrong. I tried to describe my favorite romance plot from Gilbert and Sullivan's Utopia, Limited (1893) to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants earlier this evening and I'm worried it came out like affectionate word salad.
I have![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 to thank for introducing me to the operetta; she mentioned it favorably sometime in 2007 and I read the libretto out of the gigantic volume of G&S with illustrations that I inherited from my grandparents and fell in love with the secondary couple on the spot, even though I think I've heard the music exactly once on a road trip. The whole thing is a satire of Englishness set on a fictitious South Seas island recently opened to commerce with Britain, which is one of the reasons I suspect it is rarely performed. I don't remember being knocked over by the music, either, which may be another. And while I suspect the deus ex absurdo of the Joint Stock Company Act of 1862 will still resonate in an era where corporations are considered people, it's a particularly abstruse get-out-of-jail-free card even for G&S. I have nonetheless hoped for a number of years for a local production to turn up, because I love this one thread and it justifies the existence of the rest of the operetta for me.
At the start of the story, King Paramount of Utopia has imported an English governess, the redoubtable Lady Sophy, to educate his two younger daughters as is now the fashion among all the royalty of the South Seas. (The eldest is off at university in England; her return will precipitate the second act.) She's the middle-aged contralto and he is desperately in love with her, but his unscrupulous advisors have taken advantage of a loophole in the Utopian constitution—the government being of the form known as "Despotism tempered by Dynamite," it's always been an option that a King who governs badly can be blown up by order of his Wise Men—to force him under threat of explosion to write scurrilous articles about himself under various pen names, with the result that even his own Public Exploder believes he's an embarrassing libertine. He takes a kind of sad professional pride in his skills as a satirist and is otherwise very depressed. Lady Sophy, meanwhile, having progressed through the courts of Europe with a wreckage of royal hearts in her wake—she vowed to marry only a monarch of blameless character and hasn't found one yet, though not for lack of trying—actually returns Paramount's affections, but his reputation makes it impossible for her to tell him. In person she finds him sweet, smart, and honorable; then she picks up the latest paper and reads such things as would make Elegabalus blush and despairs all over again. Her attempts to determine the truth of the rumors are prevented by Paramount's resigned insistence that he cannot put the authors to death even if they are lying. It's weirdly poignant for a completely ridiculous situation. Fortunately, common sense and legal obfuscation come to their aid: the Princess Zara returns from England, discovers her father's situation, and determines that the solution is to turn Utopia into the joint stock company of the title, legally rendering the King a corporation rather than an individual and therefore no longer subject to dynamiting ("You may wind up a Limited Company, / You cannot conveniently blow it up!"), whereupon Paramount and Lady Sophy come clean to one another, perform an adorable duet, and kiss so enthusiastically that it embarrasses his children. There's more plot, but I pretty much don't care about it. I am in it entirely for the eccentric middle-aged couple who are just so happy to be able to make out at last. My post-canon fantasy is that ex-King Paramount becomes a political humorist on his own time and is very successful at it.
(This is not a movie, of course, and I need to be writing about those. I need to start sleeping more first. It's four in the morning; much chance of that.)
skygiants earlier this evening and I'm worried it came out like affectionate word salad.I have
fleurdelis28 to thank for introducing me to the operetta; she mentioned it favorably sometime in 2007 and I read the libretto out of the gigantic volume of G&S with illustrations that I inherited from my grandparents and fell in love with the secondary couple on the spot, even though I think I've heard the music exactly once on a road trip. The whole thing is a satire of Englishness set on a fictitious South Seas island recently opened to commerce with Britain, which is one of the reasons I suspect it is rarely performed. I don't remember being knocked over by the music, either, which may be another. And while I suspect the deus ex absurdo of the Joint Stock Company Act of 1862 will still resonate in an era where corporations are considered people, it's a particularly abstruse get-out-of-jail-free card even for G&S. I have nonetheless hoped for a number of years for a local production to turn up, because I love this one thread and it justifies the existence of the rest of the operetta for me.At the start of the story, King Paramount of Utopia has imported an English governess, the redoubtable Lady Sophy, to educate his two younger daughters as is now the fashion among all the royalty of the South Seas. (The eldest is off at university in England; her return will precipitate the second act.) She's the middle-aged contralto and he is desperately in love with her, but his unscrupulous advisors have taken advantage of a loophole in the Utopian constitution—the government being of the form known as "Despotism tempered by Dynamite," it's always been an option that a King who governs badly can be blown up by order of his Wise Men—to force him under threat of explosion to write scurrilous articles about himself under various pen names, with the result that even his own Public Exploder believes he's an embarrassing libertine. He takes a kind of sad professional pride in his skills as a satirist and is otherwise very depressed. Lady Sophy, meanwhile, having progressed through the courts of Europe with a wreckage of royal hearts in her wake—she vowed to marry only a monarch of blameless character and hasn't found one yet, though not for lack of trying—actually returns Paramount's affections, but his reputation makes it impossible for her to tell him. In person she finds him sweet, smart, and honorable; then she picks up the latest paper and reads such things as would make Elegabalus blush and despairs all over again. Her attempts to determine the truth of the rumors are prevented by Paramount's resigned insistence that he cannot put the authors to death even if they are lying. It's weirdly poignant for a completely ridiculous situation. Fortunately, common sense and legal obfuscation come to their aid: the Princess Zara returns from England, discovers her father's situation, and determines that the solution is to turn Utopia into the joint stock company of the title, legally rendering the King a corporation rather than an individual and therefore no longer subject to dynamiting ("You may wind up a Limited Company, / You cannot conveniently blow it up!"), whereupon Paramount and Lady Sophy come clean to one another, perform an adorable duet, and kiss so enthusiastically that it embarrasses his children. There's more plot, but I pretty much don't care about it. I am in it entirely for the eccentric middle-aged couple who are just so happy to be able to make out at last. My post-canon fantasy is that ex-King Paramount becomes a political humorist on his own time and is very successful at it.
(This is not a movie, of course, and I need to be writing about those. I need to start sleeping more first. It's four in the morning; much chance of that.)
