"I believe Patience is really about love ..."
director Catherine Huntress-Reeve writes about PATIENCE
A many years ago (when I was young and charming), I was cast as Lady Jane in my first Patience. I loved the music, and had a ball doing the production, but left the process baffled by the whole aesthetic thing, and the feeling that I didn’t really “get” Lady Jane. More Janes came along, and with each passing birthday I felt that I understood her better. I learned about the Pre-Raphaelites, read Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries, and discovered the work of William Morris. So, when approached to direct this production, I thought “I know what Patience is about this time! I’m ready!”
Well, yes and no. Yes, Patience is set in a world of aesthetic poets and rapturous maidens, yes, it was inspired by Wilde, Rosetti, and the rest, but it’s really both larger and more personal than that. Aestheticism is merely the lens through which we view the themes of the work, not the theme itself. And this lens isn’t the only thing that distinguishes this piece from the rest of the Savoy operas.
As I prepared for this production, I made a number of interesting discoveries, beginning with the fact that this piece has no villain – no Dick Deadeye, Mikado, or bad baronets. It also has no clever little devices: no love potions or legal fictions, no cryptic nursery maids to make everything come out right.
Then, too, the humor in Patience is much gentler than in other Savoy operas, lacking the sharpness of, say, Gilbert’s skewering of the class system in HMS Pinafore. The characters are drawn with tolerant amusement, rather than with smarting satire.
In his book A Most Ingenious Paradox, Gayden Wren points out the Patience is the first of a series of three Savoy operas which have a woman’s name for a title (Patience, Iolanthe, Princess Ida) and the plots of which turn on the growth and choices of the title characters. All three of these characters are stronger and more complex than their predecessors. (Once Mabel [Pirates] decides to marry Frederick, her contributions to the plot are purely expository while Patience, throughout, drives other people’s decisions by her own choices.) So Gilbert’s book for Patience signals a change in the treatment of (at least some) women in the Savoy canon.
On the personal level, the opera is about people. No ghosts, no kings, no exotic settings, just plain people confusedly trying to figure out who they are and whom they love. They change their minds as frequently as they change their outfits.
These multi-faceted characters, with their genuine issues, brought out the best in Sullivan as a composer. The score of Patience is a mature musical structure in which character-based motifs carry through the entire work. To my ear, the score also shows very little of Sullivan’s great knack for musical parody – while so many of the other operas call to mind Handel, Arne, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and so on, Patience calls to mind – well, Sullivan. (Perhaps this is because Sullivan was one of the great writers of parlor songs during the time of the aesthetics, and he was parodying himself?)
At the risk of over-analyzing what is essentially a sweet comedy, in the end I believe Patience is really about love. The operetta wonders what love is, how true love can be identified, and what the distinction might be between love and insanity. The characters are simply (admittedly eccentric) people and the music is beautiful. Once again, I’m having a ball doing the production.
