Gilbert and Sullivan’s Improbable New Musical… And Helen – Brighton Fringe

Gilbert and Sullivan’s Improbable New Musical… And Helen, The Coily Dart Theatre Company’s pre-recorded audio presentation in collaboration with Brighton Fringe, is available until 27 July 2021.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

For G&S buffs this show with a script by Susan Ellerby is great fun. It’s clever, witty, full of earworms (of course) and very original. It might be a bit esoteric for people who aren’t in the G&S club although it’s very accessible.

Sir Arthur Sullivan, WS Gilbert and Richard D’Oyly Carte are in heaven (or somewhere) playing Scrabble while Carte’s wife Helen organises them – as she always did. Regrettably they decide, since they’ve been dead for 120 years, the rules don’t permit the writing of a new show. But perhaps,  since there’s a song somewhere in the existing operas to suit every occasion, it would be all right to tell a new story…

Helen Black, later LeNoir, was intelligent and theatrically ambitious but held back, of course, by her sex. She went to work for Carte as his secretary and later married him (cue for a quick  rendering of ‘There is Beauty in the Bellow of the Blast’ because neither was young.)

The thrust of this little show is that Helen worked very hard to make a lot of things happen and has rarely been acknowledged for it. She went to the US (cue for ‘We Sail the Oceans Blue’) to establish the copyright for The Pirates of Penzance).

She also acted as peacemaker during the famous row over the foyer carpet at the Savoy (cue for ‘In a Contemplative Fashion’).

A cast of eight, with Vicki Hing (who also did the musical arrangements) on piano created this show during the winter of 2020/21 and all the work was done individually. None of them met at any point.

Well I’m afraid some of the voices sound a bit croakily out of practice and the synching doesn’t always get the timing right. This way of working does nothing for intonation either and it’s difficult to make dialogue sound anything but hammy when actors have no one present to bounce off.

Nonetheless it’s a very valiant effort and  this is a show with lots of legs. And I’d really like to see it live sometime as I’m sure Coily Dart will run with it as soon as they can. This is their third show and the previous two both sold out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Susan Elkin