The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists, Gideon Defoe

Apologies for the lack of recent reviews. I'd been in a bit of a reading slump, having £20 to spend in Waterstone's and not finding anything I wanted to buy with that money! It is a strange feeling for me, and quite unnatural. But upon seeing The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, I remembered Hanna's review and thought this might well be the thing to make me want to pick up a book again. It seemed to work. My next stop was a coffee shop, where I proceeded to embarrass myself by giggling a lot at this book.

"Ship's biscuits? I've got ship's custard creams, and ship's bourbons."

The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists is a rollicking adventure featuring a crew of very stupid pirates who find themselves... surprise, surprise... caught up in an adventure with scientists. Namely, a young Charles Darwin, along with his trained monkey, Mr Bobo. I think every child at one point in their life has a dream of becoming a pirate, and Gideon Defoe plays with the childish impression of piracy on the high seas - lots of roaring "arrrgh!" to fill in time between adventures - and thumbs his nose at the idea of any kind of realism. The Pirates!...& Scientists is written in a very simplistic style of prose, packed with deliberate anachronisms for comic effect. The whole thing read like a cross between Monty Python, Lemony Snicket and the Them's version of the Spanish Inquisition in Good Omens. (Art thou a witch, Viva Espana?)


Although it reads rather like it was written by an overimaginative ten-year-old making things up as s/he goes along - which is not meant as a criticism, because ten-year-olds have not yet grown out of pure creativity - there was just enough satirical commentary beneath the silliness to demonstrate that it was not as simple as it seemed - though mostly it's just a very enthusiastic adventure, with a bit of innuendo, a lot of slapstick and a couple of lines that had to be references to popular culture, such as the Pirate Captain's "brilliant impression of what a lady sounded like," and his failure to spot an approaching hurricane.* The Pirates!...& Scientists is a quick read, slightly surreal, very silly indeed, and simply a lot of fun.

The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists has been adapted as an animated film by Aardman (the people behind Wallace and Gromit) with an all-star cast headed up by Hugh Grant as the Pirate Captain and David Tennant as Charles Darwin. I'm wondering if this might be a good use of my Cineworld gift card... (Elsewhere the movie is called The Pirates! Band of Misfits for some mysterious reason.)






*In 1987, Michael Fish, a BBC weatherman, infamously reported: "Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way; well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't."


There was.


(Well... not technically a hurricane, but the worst storm including hurricane-force winds that Britain's known in my lifetime.)

Book Blogger Hop and Trial By Jury/Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert and Sullivan

The Book Blogger Hop

It's Friday again and time for the Book Blogger Hop. The Hop is a quick and easy way to find out what other book blogs are out there, and to find out a little about the people behind them. The Hop is hosted by Jennifer at Crazy for Books, and if you visit her site you'll find a question to answer and lots of clicky-links to all this week's Hoppers' blogs, all in one place. Simples!

"Do you ever wish you would have named your blog something different?"

Actually, yes I do. Katie's Book Blog may tell you what the blog is about, but it doesn't have much personality to it, and there are plenty of other Katies out there with book blogs. I wish I'd used a bit more imagination when I started blogging. I've also included reviews of film and TV, so it's only mostly about books. Perhaps a title with "Story" in it would be more appropriate. Still, at least I won't be able to look back in a couple of years and groan, "what was I thinking to come up with such a cheesy name?!" as I have done in the past.

Theatre: Trial by Jury/Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert and Sullivan

The last couple of months I haven't been able to read and write as much as I'd like as I've been in rehearsals for a double bill of Gilbert and Sullivan: Trial By Jury and Pirates of Penzance. As you can imagine, trying to fit rehearsals for two shows into the same space as the usual one has been a lot of hard work and quite stressful at times. Two weeks ago it seemed that these operettas would never be ready for an audience! But credit to all involved, each rehearsal was noticeably better than the last and at last on our dress rehearsal we were informed by our patient but pernickety Musical Director that it was going to be a "really good show."

We're setting Trial in the modern day, despite it being about a trial for Breach Of Promise Of Marriage. I've been cast as the Counsel for the Plaintiff, originally a man's part. I'm loving the part, as - for a change! - there is no giggling, swooning or screaming involved - I just get to power-dress and glower over a pair of glasses. I'm looking forward to seeing the DVD of the show as I miss much of what is going on, either because the character is studiously ignoring everyone else's disgraceful behaviour, or because the judge - a red-faced drunken buffoon - sits behind me.

Ruth and the Pirate King

Pirates is set more traditionally in the late 19th century - you really can't do anything else, with its particular finale - and that means (for the ladies) big, heavy dresses and sun-bonnets. It may look very pretty but get very hot and uncomfortable under the stage lights. The pirates are a fearsome crew of scoundrels with plenty of scars, swords and "arrrr!" - and Ruth, the "piratical maid-of-all-work" seems to take great pleasure in her make-up, with stick-on warts, blackened teeth, a mono-brow and Johnny Depp-style beads dangling from her bandanna. The woman's only supposed to be forty-seven years old. Evidently a life of piracy does not suit her. And she does not suit a life of piracy. Anyone who has read Swallows and Amazons knows that you just can't have a pirate named Ruth. Pirates should be ruthless. (Though, bless 'em, they do try to get rid of her with Frederic. And besides, they're pretty useless pirates. For one thing, they don't drink rum, but sherry!)

A policeman and
Ma-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ay...bel
relax at the bar.

Pirates is probably the best-loved and most accessible of Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas - probably because pirates make anything more interesting! It has some wonderful songs that everyone is familiar with, notably the Major-General's song, "A Policeman's Lot is Not A Happy One, and "With Cat-Like Tread" (The tune of the chorus, "Come, friends, who plough the sea..." is one I've known all my life without knowing what it was.) The heroine, Mabel, has some ridiculously over-the top "warbles" that I always thought marked her out as being a bit of a spoilt princess - thankfully the director agreed, and this is how she is being played.

This is my favourite part of the show, as performed with great energy by the Australian Opera.

Mabel and Frederic

We usually have a problem in our company finding enough men for the shows - notoriously, last year's The Sorcerer, which involves pairing off the chorus after a love potion is put into the teapot, ended with each man marrying two wives! If you know Trial by Jury, you'll know that this is Not Allowed - it is Burglary [sic]. This year, as well as having a big enough men's chorus for policemen AND pirates, AND to pair off with all the ladies at the end, we even had a young tenor to cast as Frederic, a rather important role to get right as the plot revolves around his twenty-first birthday. (Except it isn't - he was born on February 29th in a leap year, which means that he is a little boy of five!)



"Paulette" and "Michelle"

So far there have been two performances and aside from a few muddled words and missed entrances, it seems to have gone pretty well - certainly better than the pessimists were predicting a couple of weeks ago. Tuesday was the dress rehearsal, and that day we had the local paper's photographer in, so the actors who played the Pirate King and Major-General Stanley were in those costumes through Trial. Wednesday, opening night, I walked into the theatre clubroom to see their Trial costumes for the first time. There they were, in their wigs... skirts... handbags. How was I going to keep my Mrs Grumpy Face act up looking at that? Couldn't they have given me some warning? But when it came down to it, I barely noticed, being too busy watching the musical director. In fact I think I stayed in character throughout Trial, despite a coatstand crashing down on me as I made my entrance. I glared at it and let someone else pick it up. In actual fact I was thinking, "Oh help! I don't know how to make this work in the scene. Let's pretend that didn't happen."

Two more days to go, three more performances, and then I hope I'll be able to get back to posting regular book reviews. In the meantime I'll leave you with a clip from another Australian production of Pirates - they seem to do the best! This song is originally from Ruddigore but is sometimes included in Pirates. After all, "this particularly rapid unintelligible patter isn't generally heard, and if it is, it doesn't matter." Enjoy!