Word: baronets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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High atop the House of Kirkland, surrounded by all the comforts of a modern-day baronet (water bed, stand up bar, powerful stereo) lives the man who will carry the lance in Saturday's joust against Yale. Even if the foe unseats him, his name will still resound like that of a king: Judson Burke St. John...
Waugh's first wife ran off with a future baronet, and betrayal by women is recurrent in much of his fiction. The ladies are usually charming and never malicious but they are prime examples in Waugh' natural history of thoughtlessness. Thei egoism, stupidity, conceit and self-regard become the causes for both cruelty and comedy. In A Handful of Dust, for ex ample, Brenda Last cheats on her hus band Tony. He journeys to South Amer ica and ends as the prisoner of an illiterate jungle madman who makes Tony read Dickens aloud to him for the rest...
...village flower much preoccupied with etiquette, loves young Robin Oakapple (Mark Clements), who possesses "the manners of a marquis and the morals of a Methodist." Robin loves Rose, too, but he harbors a terrible secret: he is masquerading as a farmer to avoid acknowledging his position as the 22nd baronet of Murgatroyd. His title carries with it some rather grim duties: the baronet must commit a crime every day, or die in torment at the hands of his ancestors. This curse makes life troublesome for ladies who love Murgatroyds. Dame Hannah, played by Jeannette Worthen, was forced to renounce Robin...
...plot's broader outlines have to do with a witch's curse that dooms each baronet of Ruddigore to commit a crime a day, on pain of an agonizing death administered by his ancestors. They're so utterly ridiculous that Gilbert apparently lost all interest in them, tacking on a perfunctory legalistic technicality of an ending to take off the curse and bring the ancestors to life--selectively, because he didn't have enough female leads to marry them...
...full, singing tone from his fine orchestra, as is only proper, since Ruddigore has more than its share of set-apart showpieces--Thomas D. Fuller's hornpipe in the first act, the respectable caper Edith Marshall as a reformed Mad Margaret dances with Pell Osborn as a reformed wicked baronet in the second, the astonishing materialization of the Ruddigore ancestors, led by David Buchner, from their picture gallery--as well as a first-act finale that includes one madrigal, with lyrics about how nice the seasons are, that's one of the lovliest things Sullivan ever wrote...