: W.S. Gilbert
: Foggerty's Fairy
: Renard Press
: 9781804470442
: 1
: CHF 3.60
:
: Dramatik
: English
: 128
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Take care. The consequences of an act are often much more numerous and important than people have any idea of.' Today W.S. Gilbert is best known for the comic operas he produced in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, a creative partnership that diverged over the supernatural. Unlike Sullivan, Gilbert was a great fan of fairy tales, and Foggerty's Fairy, one of his most unjustly neglected plays, is a brilliant farcical comedy that hinges on the wish-granting of a fairy.  Loosely based on his short story 'The Story of a Twelfth Cake', Foggerty's Fairy considers the dangers of playing with the past. Trying to shore up his relationship, a man enlists a fairy's help to make a few tweaks in his past - he soon realises, however, these small changes have made great waves through time, and his present becomes unbearable.

William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) was a dramatist, poet, author, illustrator and librettist. Although he was a prolific writer, producing around 75 plays and dramatic works, he is best known today for the comic operas he produced in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, including HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, which continue to enjoy huge popularity worldwide.

introduction

foggerty: There’s one question I should like to ask – this is not a pantomime?

rebecca: Bless the man, no.

foggerty: It won’t end in my being changed into Harlequin, and Jenny into Columbine, or any nonsense of that sort, will it? Because if it does—

rebecca: You need not alarm yourself. This is not a Pantomime, but a very graceful and poetical Fairy Extravaganza. Rather dull, perhaps, but quite refined, and containing nothing whatever that could shock the sensibilities of the most fastidious.

(Foggerty’s Fairy, Acti)

Foggerty’s Fairy is one of W.S. Gilbert’s funniest and most inventive plays, but also one of his least well known. Its central idea, that to make even the smallest alteration to the past leads to major changes in the present, may seem child’s play to a modern audience brought up on the conventions of twentieth-century science fiction, but it was unfamiliar to many at the time. First performed at London’s Criterion Theatre on the 15th of December 1881, it bewildered critics and audiences alike. They generally agreed with the mixed assessment ofReynolds’ Paper: ‘It is a play full of original and witty conceit; but the plot is madness gone mad.’ TheReferee declared: ‘Foggerty’s Fairy is a puzzle which wearies in the solution,’ while theSportsman judged the plot to be ‘something too much like a proposition in the sixth book of Euclid to be followed by any average audience’. Despite its widely acknowledged wit and invention, it lasted for only twenty performances, closing on the 6th of January 1882.

However, the idea of the play originated much earlier. Gilbert had contributed an illustrated short story called ‘The Story of a Twelfth Cake’ to the Christmas number of theGraphic in 1874. It told the tale of confectioner Tommy Williamson, who is granted three wishes by a visiting fairy, enabling him to obliterate elements from his past – each wish flinging him into an ever-worse alternative present, until, with his final wish, he obliterates from his life the meeting with the fairy that had caused all the trouble in the first place.

Five years later, in 1879, having been commissioned by the actor Edward Askew Sothern to write a play, Gilbert recalled his old story and developed it into a wild farcical comedy. Sothern was best known in his time