ARTSMONDAY: Playful ‘Princess’ Strikes Misogynistic Chord

If you like your music swelling, your symbols phallic, and your women ignorant, then “Princess Ida” is the show for you.

A rare foray by Gilbert and Sullivan into social criticism, the musical treats the titular namesake Princess Ida (Lisa D. Lareau ’06) in her battle against patriarchy and the masculine world. Engaged from infancy to Prince Hilarion (Pedro K. Kaawaloa Jr. ’05), a 20-year-old Ida chooses to forsake the safety of her relationship with her male partner and instead cloisters herself within a female university, where she abandons all things male.

Upset, her fiancé infiltrates his Princess’s “castle,” (her university) and attempts to win her over—in the process mocking the idea of women’s education and independence.

But social commentary is not the draw of Gilbert and Sullivan—light farce and playful ditties are. At least in the latter, the work succeeds—the music is reminiscent of a fifties melodrama and suits the story well. However, the lyrics fall flat in places, and they were sometimes difficult to hear with the orchestral accompaniment (or perhaps simply poor acoustics in the Agassiz Theatre). Nonetheless, the singing itself evidenced the actors’ skills.

To be sure, though, the most interesting parts of the production were the gendered costumes and props. The men wore colorful and flamboyant tunics while the women and “eunuchs” (feminized men) wore plain monochrome dresses or academic robes, thematically highlighting their inferior status as background characters.

The failure of the Prince and his friends to create a believable feminine identity simply by wearing women’s clothes (in contrast to the convincing disguise they provide for men in Shakespearean comedies) reveals the play’s agenda to express gender as rigid and biologically-determined. The fact that the eunuchs can dress monochromatically like women demonstrates that they have lost their biologically male trait.

The weapons born by each sex also carried significance in the play’s commentary on the definition of gender. The male soldiers used lances, whose phallic significance was emphasized by constant thrusting at the women, and the women carried axes, hinting at castration and emasculation. Ida’s university, Castle Adamant, itself seemed to serve as a symbol for the female genitalia, since the Prince and his courtiers had to “penetrate” it in order to win over the Princess and the students.

In fact, the director notes in the program that he edited the script to tone down its misogyny and provide a more balanced satire of both sexes, as well as add to the humor.

It is debatable whether Miller succeeded in his mission, though the presentation’s faults can probably be attributed to Gilbert and Sullivan’s work itself and not the production, which was overall very solid.

“Princess Ida”’s message seems outdated by modern standards, and unfortunately the story itself and its songs are not compelling enough to overcome this conceptual flaw. Regardless of the work’s merit, the actors and directors collaborated admirably to synthesize a good production of perhaps only a mediocre musical.