or the Flowers of Progress
By Waldmarschall
Hello, all.
Here’s the piece I promised the comrades at Kos on Utopia. It’s one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s last collaborations, and most critics and enthusiasts alike seem to scorn it. My partner and I came very close to getting this staged at our college two years ago, and I still crave a chance to be involved with this show, or at least see it in its entirety. (I’ve listened to every version of the soundtrack I can find including one which includes the full libretto).
I’d particularly recommend finding “In Every Mental Lore/Let all Your Doubts Take Wing”, “A King of Autocratic Power We”, “Zara’s Return”, “It’s Understood, I Think”, “Some Seven Men form an Association”, Act 1 Finale, “Society has Quite Forsaken” (the show stopper) and the libretto-heavy penultimate song (the finale is a shameless tribute to British superiority, apparently thrown in to soften the blows landed earlier in the show) on youtube before reading this, but to each her own.
For those who don’t know, William Gilbert (librettist) and Arthur Sullivan (composer) were English dramatists active in the late 19th century. They collaborated on 14 light operas (bearing more resemblance to modern musicals than to opera), 13 of which survive. Their three biggest hits were H.M.S. Pinafore, the Pirates of Penzance, and the Mikado. After their well received twelfth work The Gondoliers, they had one of their many fights and split up for several years. Their mutual patron, Doyly Carte, got them to collaborate for two more projects, neither of which was as successful as their earlier twelve, and this is a pity, because the first of these reunion operas is, in my opinion, the finest they ever wrote. Briefly stated- in order to escape assassination, a king must declare himself, his country, and each of his subjects to be a corporation instead of a person. It utilizes many of the same colonialist tropes as the Mikado while making them even more obviously absurd, and openly attacks the folly of forcibly assimilating other cultures. Most importantly, it contains the earliest “Corporations are NOT people” joke I know of (1893!)
Gilbert’s Utopia- the setting for the show- is a supposedly primitive south pacific island which nonetheless has a good relationship with Great Britain (presumably one of the many such alliances made during the Napoleonic Wars), ruled over by the good King Paramount. Paramount wishes to bring his people (whom he has been told to think of as savage, or backwards) forward into the western community of nations by remodelling his society along British lines. To this end, he has sent his eldest daughter, Princess Zara, to study in Great Britain and she has returned, bringing with her the “Flowers of Progress”- experts in British business, local government, army, navy, censorship, and law, to help modernize Utopia. His Majesty has also employed an English Governess- Lady Sophy- to teach his two younger daughters how to be proper, and has fallen in love with her.
King Paramount can do all this on account of being “A King of Autocratic Power, We, a Despot Whose Tyrannic Whim is Law”, but there is a snag in his plans from which all troubles follow: under the Utopian Constitution, the King’s power is to be absolute, albeit subject to the approval of two Wise Men (current incumbents Scaphio and Phantis), because the king is required by the constitution to wear a suicide belt, and, according to Scaphio and Phantis, “If ever a trick he tries he tries that savours of rascality, at our degree he dies he dies without the least formality”- as they can then summon the Public Exploder to His Majesty (current incumbent Tarara), whose job it then becomes to detonate the king. So functions the system of government known as “Despotism Tempered by Dynamite”.
These wise men, however are grossly corrupt, holding the king’s life hostage every day to extort favorable policy, or more likely, shameful antics from his majesty, compelling him to write scandalous denunciations of his own character under assumed names for the society press, wherein he falsely accuses himself of dancing with housemaids and bathing in rum. They extend their wishes to lechery, aimed at the lovely princess Zara, and they make a pact to force the king to order his daughter to marry one of them!
King Paramount wishes to escape their grasp by any means necessary, and after conferring with Princess Zara and her lover, the army expert Captain Arthur Fitzbattleaxe, he agrees to take advice from Fitz and the other Flowers of Progress. Their recommendations are simple and obviously intended to be fallacious- make lawyers fully mercenary and indifferent to morals, build up public facilities to justify higher property taxes, censor all media hostile to the government, build up your army and navy because the Germans are going at attack Britain and her allies any day now (this is presented as a farcical error in judgment, which I do find darkly hilarious, albeit in a rather tragically different way than Gilbert probably intended), and adopt British corporate law- the Famed Joint Stock Companies Act of 1862, which allowed business to declare capital separate from individual managers’ earnings, insulating owners from the consequences of failure. Finally, the banker promises that Britain will soon be governed exclusively by these corporate principles- “The date’s not distant”!
There are three jokes that strike me as a bit dodgy, and two of them come here- the good natured but lovably corrupt banker explaining this is named “Goldbury” which I could interpret as a mild anti-semitic caricature, and his song does refer to the Rothschilds as symbols of wealth, which is of course accurate but Gilbert could just as well have mentioned Morgan instead, and I’m a little unsure. Dodgy joke number three comes in the show stopper and will be discussed later.
Inferring that financial immunity may mean legal immunity as well, King Paramount declares that he shall go down to posterity as “the First Sovereign in Christendom who Registered His Crown and Country Under the Joint Stock Companies Act of ’62!”, and here ends act 1.
Some time passes ere Act 2 begins. Zara is still with Captain Fitzbattleaxe, and Utopia is thriving without the Wise Men’s interference, as the king has declared himself a corporation, “If my speech is unduly refractory, you will find it a course satisfactory, at my early board-meeting to show it up, though with proper excuse you can trump any, you may wind up a limited company, but you can’t conveniently blow it up!” and “as long as he confines himself to his articles of operation, we can’t touch him!” Conferring with his new advisors (the Flowers of Progress) in song “society has quite forsaken”, Paramount reveals that he has taken their suggestions to heart and created a society nearly as good as Britain. The British colonialists are increasingly shocked as they hear (from the here oblivious king) that these supposedly primitive people have actually surpassed Britain, which Fitzbattleaxe attributes to the absence of parliament, but their attempts to conceal the truth from Paramount show that the Flowers actually know that they’ve been showed up by these islanders, who have.
abolished poverty, hunger and homelessness
Solved the labour question
Instituted merit-based nobility- especially among authors
brought amicable end to all divorces
Beautified their entire realm to the standards of the richest English neighborhoods.
The song (especially the second verse) is superb- it’s only problem is in the stage direction (a really obscure joke) in that the Flowers have tricked the king into arranging the throne room in a style apparently common to the minstrel show- I had to do serious research to even figure out what they even meant by that. This is easy to fix in blocking differently, but it is a stain on an otherwise progressive show, and some productions seem to stage the following dance in a way that looks rather minstrel like to me. No blackface or anything like that is involved, but it could pose a problem to our sensibilities. The song does contain a crack at Utopia’s “hereditary races” but in the context it seems to be a use of the old meaning of race- meaning family.
As an exclusively corporate economy, in which everyone can liquidate his corporate self to avoid paying any debt, while keeping his dividends to himself. Obviously, when left to its own devices and to make its own rules, business cannot function, and many who fail to grasp this (especially the villainous Wise Men) suffer greatly in the new economy, but Paramount’s leadership delivers relief for all.
Realizing that they have lost their powers of extortion over the king, Scaphio and Phantis plot to raise a revolution in conjunction with the ousted Public Exploder. They manage to raise popular wrath “Upon our Sea-Girt Land” on behalf of the starving doctors and lawyers, since both crime and disease have been abolished under Paramount’s unfettered leadership, and Paramount relents, instituting the critical reform of government by party, which is sure to lead to plenty of work for lawyers, constabulary and medicoes, and the day is saved, as Scaphio and Phantis are finally thwarted, and Utopia, Ltd. Is finally free.
What can I say? This is superb- the absurdity of corporate personhood is skewered from the opposite direction, rather the same one as that good chestnut of a bumper sticker that says “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one” and separating personal benefit from professional action, all while showing the folly of the cultural posturing of imperialism. It also shows the absurdity of a business model that depends on being able to be the only one to get out of common rules. From stuffy 19th century liberals, this is an astoundingly subversive show with some really catchy tunes. And of course, the prescience of Gilbert’s condemnation of the British military for its laughable insistence that war with Germany was imminent is hilarious both as an attack on the military-industrial complex and for its incidental wrong-headedness.
I’d love to get a discussion going about this and what messages we see reinforced!
Solidarität, Genossinnen und Genossen