Mike Leigh’s film Topsy-Turvy won a deserved pair of Oscars for the meticulous recreation of Victorian England represented in its make-up and costume design. The work of its large cast, however, would have made for a clutch of equally deserving winners.
Leigh is known for his gritty contemporary dramas, Naked being one such, so his taking on the subject of Gilbert and Sullivan, who were responsible for a series of immensely popular operattas in the 1870s and 1880s, is an interesting diversion. But he has brought to bear on them and their milieu the same improvisatory workshop techniques he used in his other work, techniques more usual in the theatre, though they have been used in different ways and to good effect in cinema by the likes of Ken Loach and, in a rather more haphazard manner, Robert Altman.
The result is a period piece that beautifully recreates its era without feeling stuffy or stilted; the structure of Topsy-Turvy has a lovely organic feel. It begins in 1884, with Gilbert and Sullivan’s latest operetta, Princess Ida, doing less well than hoped. Manager and theatre-owner Richard D’Oyly Carte (Ron Cook) is eager for a new one, like, yesterday, but Arthur Sullivan wants to abandon the genre and devote his time to more serious compositions.
How he returns to the fold with The Mikado, one of G&S’s greatest successes, and how that work is put together, is the story of the film. There is a gap, though, in the tale: we are never really told why Sullivan reversed his decision. We are left to think that his change of heart is due simply to his being seduced by WS Gilbert’s new libretto, which was inspired by an exhibition of Japanese culture. The reality was that the profligate Sullivan, who had a perpetual on/off relationship with Gilbert, needed the money.
Sullivan, played with foppish verve by Allan Corduner, might have felt he needed to put his work on such ”trivial soufflés” (as opposed to important soufflés?) behind him, but he was the rake of the pair. A convalescent trip to a Paris brothel makes this clear. Gilbert was stolid and sedate by comparison, the very model of a Victorian gentleman, yet he was the ”monarch of the realm of Topsy-Turvydom” that is the fairytale world of the operettas, and he wrote the light-as-air libretti that, in their facetious wordplay, anticipated 20th-century songwriters such as Cole Porter. He is certainly the only person I can think of to use the word ”effulgent” in a song.
The film moves between the process of putting The Mikado together (Gilbert was a pioneer theatre director) and scenes from the play in all their bright extravagance, while registering historical events such as the siege of Khartoum and the introduction of newly invented gadgets like the telephone and the fountain pen. These little touches anchor the film in its time without getting heavily historical.
Despite the sterling performances of the leads, Topsy-Turvy is very much an ensemble piece, with excellent work by Lesley Manville as Gilbert’s wife, and Kevin McKidd, Martin Savage, Shirley Henderson, Timothy Spall and others as the Savoy Theatre actors. The portrayal of their little (or not so little) tics, tantrums and foibles leads one to think that, when it comes to the acting profession, not an awful lot has changed.