BWW Reviews: PATIENCE, Union Theatre, February 17 2012

Men in drag always look ridiculous: too hairy, too big and the wrong shape. Ideal then for the preposterous plotting of Gilbert and Sullivan's somewhat neglected Patience - the Victorian geniuses' affectionate, if occasionally biting, satire on the aesthetic movement of the 1880s (that's Oscar and friends). Of course, once the decision to cast only men is taken, it is vital that the men can act and sing and that the eyebrow is never arched, else the conceit collapses. Sasha Regan's track record in all-male Gilbert and Sullivans, supported by young actors perfectly suited to their roles, ensures that the humour is sustained beautifully for two hours.

Patience (Edward Charles Bernstone) oscillates between the poet who longs to say what he really thinks about the absurdity of the overblown language of his verses, Reginald Bunthorne (Dominic Brewer) and Archibald Grosvenor (Stiofan O'Doherty), who is tortured by his physical beauty and tortures the women who hang on his every word with his pedestrian doggerel. While the "Twenty love sick maidens" sigh and simper at the oh so fashionable aesthetes, the dragoons on whom they previously bestowed their affections, adopt the old maxim, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" to hilarious effect.

While the laughs comes thick and fast, the music is never less than wonderful, "the maidens" hitting high falsettos and the men belting out William Gilbert's wicked wit to Arthur Sullivan's immortal melodies in a compact space in which the visceral quality of operatic singing is literally in your face. Highlights include the dragoon's chorus supported by "the maidens" off-stage singing in their male registers filling the space thrillingly with voices and Lady Jane's (Sean Quigley) plaintive lament for the passing of time on a woman not blessed by attractive features.

As London's recession bites deeper and the news is filled relentlessly with harbingers of doom, "Patience" is guaranteed to put a spring in anyone's step - another triumph for a theatre that continues to take seriously the underrated art of not taking oneself too seriously.

 

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