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Screening NotesIt's 1884, and the most successful creative partnership on the English stage is in trouble. An unkind review of 'Princess Ida' has dubbed librettist WS Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) 'the king of Topsy-Turvydom', while the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) has decided to devote himself to more serious classical pieces instead of fulfilling his contract with the impressario D'Oyly Carte (Ron Cook). The stalemate is broken when Gilbert visits an exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts, finds the inspiration to pen 'The Mikado', and engages Sullivan's creative juices once more. Still, this groundbreaking operetta will set new challenges for the Savoy Company's insecure baritone (Tim Spall), pompous tenor (Kevin McKidd) and single-mum soprano (Shirley Henderson)…
Mike Leigh's first celluloid foray into period costume appears a radical departure from his usual provocative contemporary style, but rustling frocks and painstaking enunciation aside, the concerns are familiar: tensions between inner lives and public faces, between men and women, work and pleasure. The theatrical setting allows Leigh to register his affection for (and dept to?) the actors and singers whose unique contributions make any performance (whether G & S or a Mike Leigh movie) what it is. Over 159 minutes, we become truly immersed in these pressurised lives, sensing both the satisfactions of the footlights and the emotional price paid by damaged individuals like Broadbent's extraordinary Gilbert, a tortured perfectionist unable to connect with the loving overtures made by his long-suffering spouse (Lesley Manville, wonderful).
As the fascinating rehearsals gather pace 'The Mikado' stumbles into life before our eyes, and Truffaut's 'Day for Night' comes to mind. That said, Leigh's cast are beyond compare, and the whole big-hearted, splendidly droll celebration of the entertainer's lot surely stands among British cinema's one-of-a-kind treasures.
Trevor Johnston, Time Out.
An interview with Mike Leigh
This is a very different film from your others.
"I've always made a very deliberate attempt to make every film different,
because I think one should. The contrast between say, Life Is Sweet and Naked
is just as great, but because Topsy Turvy is a period film, it seems more of
a change. It concerns a world I've been living in for a long time - it's about
actors and performers, and the nature of the collaboration. I wanted to make
a film where I swung the camera round to look at 'us', but I thought it would
be more interesting, and liberating, to look at the 19th century, rather than
making a film about film-makers."
Why Gilbert and Sullivan?
"I grew up in Manchester in the Forties and Fifties, when the late Victorian
era was recent enough to hang in the air. Gilbert and Sullivan were part of
the culture of that era. What's happened since is that it's been degenerated
by endless conventions. When people say they hate Gilbert and Sullivan, it's
usually because their auntie used to appear in it, or their teachers used to
ram it up their arses. One thing I wanted to do was subvert this 'chocolate
box' image, and go back to the roots. Gilbert and Sullivan are extremely interesting
characters, and I honestly think their work is very healthy. It isn't esoteric
or inaccessible, it's popular, sexy music that can get your foot tapping. If
you can't make a movie about 'The Mikado', then you can't make a movie about
anything."
Was the dialogue improvised in the same way as in your previous films?
"Totally, because of the formal language, it gives the illusion that it's
somehow more precise, but I'm equally precise about colloquial language. If
you think about Johnny's cadences in Naked, they're no less literary than Topsy
Turvy. The only difference this time is that woven into the text are actual
quotes. So some of Gilbert's epigrams are things he actually said, some Jim
improvised, and others I wrote. We got so much into the bloodstream of the thing
we could make them up."
You've referred to some of the wider issues of the period, such as the death of General Gordon.
"I'm used to creating a kind of hermetically sealed world, where characters
don't talk about the outside world because they're concerned with their own
affairs. And the world of Topsy Turvy is the theatre, where people are absorbed
in their work. But in creating that, we carried out vast research about the
period, and found all sorts of things that were happening at the time. For dramatic
reasons, I couldn't include them all, but I thought it was necessary to refer
to some of them. In particular, the shooting of Gordon at Khartoum did happen
at that time, and it was a very traumatic moment in British history. And it's
fascinating from today's perspective, because it never occurred to anyone that
Gordon simply shouldn't have been there, that imperialism was a bad thing."
There's an effective scene with the newly invented telephone.
"I wanted to do a period film almost as a reaction to those period films
where you think, 'Well, people aren't like that.' The minutiae of the everyday
is part of the process with which I work, so we can include scenes like the
one with the telephone, which you can't do with a Jane Austen adaptation. I
also thought it was important to see the industrial process of the production,
so you have an exact from 'The Sorcerer', where you get to see the guy with
the thunder sheet and someone messing about with the wing. The audience needs
to see the working world that these people were involved in, not just the end
product."
Interviewed by Robert McTaggart, Uncut Magazine.
| William Schwenk Gilbert | Jim Broadbent |
| Arthur Sullivan | Allan Corduner |
| Richard Temple | Timothy Spall |
| Lucy Gibert ('Kitty') | Lesley Manville |
| Richard D'Oyly Carte | Ron Cook |
| Helen Lenoir | Wendy Nottingham |
| Durward Lely | Kevin McKidd |
| Leonora Braham | Shirley Henderson |
| Jessie Bond | Dorothy Atkinson |
| George Grossmith | Martin Savage |
| Fanny Ronalds | Eleanor David |
| Madame Leon | Alison Steadman |
| Madame | Katrin Cartlidge |
| Mad Woman | Brid Brennan |
