The trajedy of Jack Point

[philena]

When I was in my final year at the University of Chicago, I sang in the chorus of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera company—as, in fact, I did every year. That year the play was The Yeomen of the Guard, which is, I believe, unique among G&S plays in that, despite the fact that there are two betrothals and (sort of) a wedding by the time the curtain falls, it nevertheless has a sad ending. The music is beautiful and the writing of each individual scene is excellent, and the first act finale in particular is brilliantly composed with terrific pacing. However, I never really liked the play very much, because, as I’ve gone around saying ofor the past five years, the ending is all wrong.

            Several weeks ago, I saw the Lamplighters’ production of the same play, and I changed my opinion entirely. The ending is not what distinguishes this G&S play from the others. In fact, it is at one of the first scenes it becomes quite clear that the development of the plot took a wrong turn (if something as briliiantly constructed as this story can be said to have taken a wrong turn anywhere) at the beginning.

           

Let us consider Phoebe’s opening song, which is about what a maiden does when she is in love. Briefly, the two verses explain, she mopes about and says “heigh-ho” (or, in verse two, “ah, me”).  And the very last line goes, “An idle breath, yet life or death may hang upon a maid’s ‘ah, me.’” In the absence of the rest of the story, the first way to interpret this line is to think that she’s melodramatically referring to the common belief that a broken heart is deadly. (In this she disagrees with Rosalind’s line in As You Like It: “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

            However, it soon becomes clear that it is not the lover’s life on the line, but the beloved’s. The first hint we see of this is Phoebe’s love for the tenor lead, Colonel Fairfax, sitting at the beginning of the play in the Tower of London, awaiting execution. If Phoebe did not love him, she would not contemplate breaking him out of prison to save him from decapitation. The danger of death and wormy digestion is in fact extremely real; the difference is only that it threatens the other party. Yet this play, remember, is a Gilbert and Sullivan play, and even if it weren’t, few successful plays kill off the tenor lead a quarter of the way through. In this case it is life that hangs upon Phoebe’s “ah, me,” and she immediately hatches a plot to rescue Colonel Fairfax, and the primary plot of the play is off and running.

            The second way in which this opening song resonates throughout the line of the plot comes from Elsie Maynard and Jack Point’s plot line. When they enter, their first song is a self-referential ballad about a mild romantic woe that is neatly resolved into a happy ending: a merry man loves a maid, who scorns him because she has her eyes on a nobleman, who scorns her, leading her to accept the love of the merry man. All is well in the song, yet one of the brilliances of the plot constructions is the fact that this song is an alternate reality of the play. It is a fantasy of how things might have ended. Jack (song-world’s merry man) loves Elsie (song-world’s maid), but for reasons too complicated to explain, she marries Fairfax (song-world’s nobleman) in prison, thinking it’s a short-term thing because, after all, he’s about to be executed.  So far everything is exactly parallel, except for the crucial difference that, in Gilbert and Sullivan plays, marriage is irreversible. For the real-world (i.e., play-world) to mirror the song-world’s happy ending, either the marriage must be annulled somehow (impossible) or Fairfax must die (which is automatically a sad ending), or Elsie must remain with Fairfax, which contradicts the ending of the song. From the instant Elsie marries Fairfax, in the instant when the parallel with the song-world’s set-up is made complete, any possibility of a parallel happy ending is destroyed. In this case, the ending is that Elsie remains with Fairfax, and Jack is so overcome by this loss that he contradicts Rosalind, and collapses and dies as the curtain falls. Here again, life and death have hung upon a maid’s “Ah, me.” First, Phoebe loved Fairfax, and so Fairfax lived. Here, Elsie loves Fairfax, and so Jack dies.

            This ending is profoundly dissatisfying, yet it was built into the play, and it is not entirely incompatible with other aspects of the mood. Taken as a whole, Yeomen of the Guard is a remarkably dark play, filed with many incidents of a sort of nastiness and mean-spiritedness that is usually absent from G&S plays. Let us consider the role of Wilfred, who works in the Tower of London torture chamber. It is certainly a good source of comedy to have a grumpy assistant tormenter, dissastisfied with his career prospects, yet willing to make the best of it and wooing (or attempting to woo) his beloved with rosy domestic pictures of future evenings spent in cheerful conversation and funny tales from work—i.e., the torture chamber. In describing his skill, for example, Wilfred explains, “In the nice regulation of a thumbscrew—in the hundredth part of a single revolution lieth all the difference between stony reticence and a torrent of impulsive unbosoming that the pen can scarcely follow.” This is a decidedly darker type of humor from what a G&S viewer is familiar with.

            The chorus, too, is a nasty piece of work. When they first come across Jack and Elsie, they demand entertainment, threatening to toss them in a river if they don’t satisfy. After the entertainment, they grope Elsie, demanding and at last taking a kiss by force so that she has to pull a knife out to protect herself. Jack fares no better with Fairfax. He accepts willingly Fairfax’s offer of assistance in the art of wooing, and when Fairfax starts hitting on Elsie (in front of Jack), Jack naively thinks that Fairfax is wooing Elsie for him. He learns the truth only when Fairfax, having successfully won Elsie’s hand, turns to Jack and stifles his objections with a snooty, “I promised thee I would show thee how to woo, and herein lies the proof of my teaching. Go thou and apply it elsewhere.” This is the man who has been lauded and praised as a good man by all who know and love him, but no one could deny that he has been fundamentally dishonorable here. He further reveals himself to be a cad at their wedding. Since Elsie is already married to him, he has in effect been wooing his own wife, but she doesn’t know that. She thinks that her unknown husband is dead. So the wedding-day with this supposedly new husband comes along, and at that moment Fairfax reveals himself (without showing his face) as her pre-existing husband, putting her through psychological hell before revealing that in fact that man she has fallen in love with is the man she has already married. It all ends up well, and the fellow who played Fairfax in this production had the voice of an angel, but he couldn’t save the character, who, even if he hadn’t tricked Jack, is still a total heel to have tormented Elsie in this way.

            Even Phoebe’s affectionate father, who so values and honors Fairfax that he will risk his career to aid him, ends up being an awfully callous man towards his daughter. Furious at learning that Fairfax is to marry Elsie, even though it was through her own actions that he escaped prison, Phoebe laments bitterly to Wilfred. Since Fairfax is wandering around under an assumed identity, silence about the truth of Fairfax’s identity is crucial, and in order to buy Wilfred’s silence, Phoebe agrees to marry him. She does not love him, and he is not a good man, but in order to save the man she still loves (the dishonorable Fairfax), Phoebe offers herself up as the price for his silence. Any good father would naturally try to do something to prevent this fate for his daughter, yet what does Phoebe’s father say? “’Tis pity, but the Colonel had to be saved at any cost, and as thy folly revealed our secret, thy folly must e’en suffer for it.” Perhaps he does not have the ability to change the situtation in Phoebe’s favor, but to accept such a marriage for his daughter so blithely is not the mark of a good father.

            Finally, the most tragic aspect of the dark mood is not based on outright nastiness on the part of a character, but a sort of balloon-popping darkness of mood. During the sort-of-wedding at the end of the play, there’s a beautiful trio sung led by Elsie, the sort-of-bride (she thinks she’s a real bride, not knowing that her husband is still alive), in which the message is that, if a woman finds unalloyed happiness at any time in her life, it is during her wedding day. Even leaving aside the torment that comes when Fairfax plays his little trick on her during the wedding, consider the very last moment: Jack shows up, sings a tragic reprise of his Merry-man-and-the-maid song, in which she has to respond with the alternate ending that matches the real world, not the song-world. He collapses, and in this production dies at her feet. How is that for affording her at least one day of unalloyed happiness? It’s not the fault of Jack, of course, but it’s as if the authors couldn’t bear the thought of allowing anyone to end the play happy. On the one day when Elsie could have hoped for that, it is denied her. Despite the humor and music and dancing and singing, it is a dark play, with a tragic ending, and it is brilliant.