Gil Hates Everything

I refer you to the plot summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Queen – got that? OK, now I refer you to Grainne Ni Mhaille’s bio here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%A1inne_N%C3%AD_Mh%C3%A1ille – compare and contrast.

Oh OK, I’ll do it for you. God, talk about rewriting history. In the show, the seafaring daughter of an Irish chieftain falls for an attractive young man, is forced into a terrible political marriage with a complete bastard, wins out against the English, is betrayed by her husband, is imprisoned for seven years, lectures Elizabeth I all about being a woman in a man’s world, and then singlehandedly brings peace to Ireland, on a very telescoped timescale. Historically, she appears to have loved or at least tolerated her political-marriage husband, and had three children with him; he wasn’t a coward and didn’t betray anyone to the English, that was their third son… and although she did indeed divorce her next husband under Brehon Law (after the first died in battle) she was much more politically savvy about it, the marriage is credited as her idea, and she got to keep his castle. She wasn’t imprisoned by the English, and she met Elizabeth I when they were both in their sixties. The boyfriend, Tiernan, is a complete invention. And as for bringing peace to Ireland… c’mon, she was a pirate, she did what the hell she wanted, including (it seems) occasional collaboration with the English during their re-conquest of the country to maintain her own political power.

I’m not sure whether the above has a point, beyond indicating that you just can’t fucking trust writers – which should come as no news to anyone. But it did put me in an extremely bad mood while listening to the show, because yes, I play for Perfidious Albion and yes, we’ve been right bastards, but I resent whitewash jobs like this. You can find enough shit in English history – the Treaty of Nanking, anyone? – without needing to make stuff up. If someone’s life doesn’t make the dramatic point you want, perhaps you’re dramatizing the wrong life? This should demonstrate to anyone needing the reminder that “based on a true story” doesn’t even guarantee that they’ve got the person’s name right, let alone kept any of the facts in any particular order. If anything, this attitude to history suggests even greater contempt for the Irish than they’re trying to whip up for the English, and makes “Grace O’Malley” sound like a victim.

As for the show itself, well, it slid right past my ears. Every time I hear another Schonberg & Boublil show I grit my teeth and wonder whether this time they’ll remember that a while back they wrote Les Miserables and seemed to have no problem with tunes there. But the memory seems to be slipping away. From me too, to be honest. One imagines the idea was that Americans would lap up a Les Mis-looking show featuring the Irish being oppressed by the English, and as someone whose American ex refused to speak to him for three days after we’d watched “Titanic” because “you people did that to them”, I can grasp the reasoning. However, fortunately, it seems that people can still go broke underestimating public taste, and “The Pirate Queen” crashed and burned.

Why is that, Gil? Well, I’m glad you asked. The reasons stack up pretty quickly: it doesn’t have any good tunes, the orchestrations are broken, the lyrics are spectacularly tedious, and the number of combat sopranos in the rigging suggests to me at least that Grace (Abraham de Lacey Guiseppe Casey Thomas) O’Malley won most of her sea battles by making her enemies’ ships vibrate apart.

As with previous S/B shows there are callbacks to tropes such as “raunchy low-class song”, here sung by O’Malley’s impending husband who threatens rather unpleasantly to tame her… and, nasty as it is, this is actually the highlight of the show in qualitative terms, and I can imagine that a show with genuinely hateful sexual politics could be quite interesting, but this isn’t it, and if you want to hear a husband and wife snarling like jackals, you could just listen to the end of “Chess”, which manages to get the point across using only the words “Liar” and “Never”.

There are some gems for connoisseurs of inexplicable lyrics: “The Role Of The Queen” features Elizabeth announcing “I love my new map!” – which is now my second favourite after “Jekyll & Hyde”‘s unbeatable “… and the front bit is called the facade” – and Grace’s sudden need to announce “At this moment in time!” during the bridge of “The Sea Of Life” is also commendably random.

But, look, this show doesn’t deserve any great and serious effort of detailed criticism. It just isn’t very good. At all. It is, in fact, the worst show I’ve heard in ages. That’s all you need to know. I diss it and dismiss it thus. Don’t waste your time even thinking about listening to it. It’s embarrassing that this shit even starts with the same letter of the alphabet as “Parade“. It should be renamed using the hidden, cursed, forsworn twenty-seventh letter, unpronounceable by human tongues, unindexed in our libraries, unreadable by the eye. Send it back, say it never happened, Ctrl-Z it, let it be stricken from the record, let time respool and let history be rewritten to uninvent it.

Which would be appropriate.

Random Panda awards this tripe one out of ten pieces of bamboo, and if I hadn’t just had lunch, I’d take that back too.

(originally posted 2009)