Our show for 2000 was Patience, which ran from November 15th to the18th including a matinee on the Saturday. The programme notes explain:
THE TOPSY-TURVY WORLD OF GILBERT & SULLIVANSir Arthur Sullivan and Oscar Wilde died within a few days of each other in November 1900. A hundred years on, the Ipswich Gilbert & Sullivan Society is celebrating the centenary by performing the Savoy Opera based on the antics of Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement.
Aesthetes were people, from the Prince of Wales downwards, who were aware of 'taste' in their daily lives. There was a cultured elite who enjoyed beauty in the clothes they wore and the houses they lived in, their willow pattern china, peacock feathers and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The focal point of this aesthetic taste was Arthur Liberty's shop in Regent Street, opened in 1875 about the time Oscar Wilde arrived in London. Wilde was a poet, a writer and a dramatist who was determined to make a name for himself. He wore his hair long; dressed in velvet coats with soft silk shirts and long flowing ties and always carried about him the emblems of the Aesthetic Movement - sunflowers, tulips and lilies. Most days he could be found holding a 'midday court' at the fashionable Café Royal in London's Piccadilly.
PATIENCE features a precious young aesthete called Bunthorne and twenty lovesick maidens who yearn only for him (they think not of the 'down-to-earth' Dragoons to whom they were once engaged!). However, Bunthorne yearns only for Patience, a waitress at the Café Royal who thinks little of him and has never loved (save an elderly aunt!) The maidens tire of Bunthorne's lack of interest and return to the Dragoons just as Grosvenor, another aesthetic poet, appears on the scene. They immediately follow him with the same intense passion that was previously focused on Bunthorne. Again the Dragoons are rejected. This topsy-turvy world is complete when the Dragoons attempt aestheticism in order to attract the young ladies back again!
Looked like this:
 Julie Roberts, playing the part of "Patience" |
 Sara Bucknall as "Lady Jane" |
 Julian Illman as the poet "Bunthorne" |
 Lynne Akers and Mavis Holmes as Lovesick Maidens. |
PRINCIPALS |
CHORUS |
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LADIES |
GENTS |
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