PINEAPPLE POLL

Choreography: John Cranko
Music: Sir Arthur Sullivan arranged by Sir Charles Mackerras
Design: Sir Osbert Lancaster

Premiered 13 March 1951 by Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet, London.

Britain 1950, exhausted and bankrupt after World War Two, the Empire turning into the Commonwealth, a social welfare state born, the Iron Curtain descended and everything still "on the ration". Austerity rules, but British ballet rides high, with the sensational international success of Sadler's Wells Ballet and its stars Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer (of Red Shoes fame).

Sadler's Wells commissions its rising choreographic star, John Cranko, to devise a suitably upbeat and definitively "English" ballet for the 1951 Festival of Britain, which is to sound a new note of national pride and celebration. It falls to the genius of a South African choreographer and an Australian conductor to conceive a comic ballet set to Sir Arthur Sullivan's music, with designs by the English humorist Sir Osbert Lancaster.

Sir Charles Mackerras felt "how wonderful it would be to arrange Sullivan's eminently danceable tunes into a sort of symphonic synthesis and score them for full orchestra", envisaging "a patchwork quilt of tunes from most of the Savoy operas, which pass by the listener so quickly as to bewilder even Gilbert & Sullivan experts".

Besides excerpts from most of the Savoy operas, Mackerras' arrangement includes purely Sullivan moments, from Cox & Box and Di Ballo. And, of course, in 1950, Sullivan's music itself had just "come off the ration" - out of copyright, fifty years after the composer's death.

But Sullivan's famous collaborator, W. S. Gilbert, was also integral to a ballet which drew its plot from The Bumboat Woman's Story, one of Gilbert's popular Bab Ballads - itself something of a dress rehearsal for G & S' first major hit HMS Pinafore. Savoyards will enjoy not only sourcing the Sullivan melodies, but reflecting on the unheard Gilbert lyrics, which are often intentionally apposite to Pineapple Poll's comic situations or the feelings of individual characters at various points in the ballet.

The bumboat woman used to sell trinkets and sweetmeats to sailors (as in Pinafore's 'Little Buttercup') and Cranko turned his Poll from Gilbert's buxom old besom into a sprightly young lass who takes to sea in pursuit of the all-conquering Captain Belaye of the HMS Hot Cross Bun, giving her an admirer of her own, in the character of the quayside pub's pot-boy Jasper.

The result, a nautical character comedy, enhanced by Osbert Lancaster's witty designs and Mackerras' irresistible Sullivan score, was the triumphantly entertaining celebration of Englishness that the 1951 Festival of Britain needed… and got.

©Tim Tubbs