“Fallen Fairies at the Savoy.”

The Outlook, 18 Dec. 1909

More of them? Fairies at the Haymarket; fairies at His Majesty’s; fairies, or at any rate a magic spell, at the Garrick; a djinn at the Vaudeville; Peter Pan’s friends just about to open the Duke of York’s; the old-style pantomime fairies reserving themselves for Boxing Day! Even without Sir W.S. Gilbert’s contingent, there are enough fairies in London just now to reduce the population of fairyland considerably. It is to be noted that each theatre is manned–or fairied–by a particular kind of fairy. Maeterlinck’s fairy is of the humpbacked, red-cloaked, stick-tapping sort. Pinkie’s fairies are small people, bearing a general resemblance to flowers; Peter Pan’s are smaller still, invisible to the naked eye indeed, though melodiously audible; the pantomime fairies–well, we all know that glittering, nasal, thirteen-stone institution, the pantomime fairy, the toughest of all the links that still bind the civilised playgoing public to the theatric ideals of twenty years ago. Sir William Gilbert’s fairies of course are cousins of the pantomime variety. They are adult, and have none of the charming whimsies and quaintnesses of the modern fairy, who talks like a bell, is invisible to grown-ups, and falls down dead when a child says “I don’t believe in fairies.” The Gilbertian fairy, in fact, is a woman; she is well-bred; she is capable of falling in love, as she does in this play, and of other and less amiable human weaknesses. She is also the vehicle of a great deal of humour of a kind which, as even the old guard of the Savoy must be beginning to perceive, is a little mechanical.

This story of the transport of two very ferocious knights to fairyland for the amendment of their characters, and of the havoc worked by their manly attractions in that feminine society, can only be disappointing to those who believe that miracles still happen, and that a man can repeat in 1909 the triumphs of the eighteen-eighties. The neatness and flow of the Gilbertian humorous versification is much the same as it was in the days when “Gilbert-and-Sullivan” was in its prime, when the stuff of the story was rich and varied, the fun unforced, the element of burlesque strong and irresistible, the music unapproachable of its kind. But to pretend that Fallen Fairies is up to the standard of Patience or Pinafore would be the insanity of flattery. It must stand on its own feet as comic opera, and in a theatrical world wholly possessed, so far as music-drama is concerned, by “musical comedy,” and musical comedy brought to a high degree of perfection as a popular form of amusement, it is doubtful if it will stand very firmly. The view of life, moreover, underlying the work is somewhat brutal in its cynicism. And the music of Mr. German is nothing, to say the least of it, out of the way.

The lighter passages of the piece are entirely in the hands of Mr. Workman as Lutin, the squire of one of the knights, and he makes a marvellous use of slender opportunities. Miss Nancy McIntosh is the fairy queen, who loves Sir Ethais, and Miss Maidie Hope as the jealous sister who supplants her in the knight’s easy affections–both do all that can be done with perfectly uninspiring parts.

OWEN STAIR.

Transcribed by Arthur Robinson