After canceling their upcoming production of the Mikado in the face of complaints that it is racist, the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players said that they “never intended to give offense.” If so, it is hard to understand why they were producing the Mikado in the first place. Gilbert and Sullivan operas are not exactly the height of musical, dramatic, or psychological sophistication. But they are timelessly unparalleled at light, biting satire—a delicious way of giving offense.
Of course, de gustibus, and all that. One can hate Gilbert and Sullivan. One can even say they’re rotten and racist (cf. Avenue Q). What one can’t do, though, is devote oneself to their work and then say, innocently: Oh, I’m sorry, no offense intended.
After all, the Mikado offended audiences from the very beginning. As Ian Bradley, editor of The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan notes, in 1907 Britain banned all performances of the opera out of fear that it would displease the visiting Crown Prince Fushimi of Japan (the ban was lifted after six weeks). Joseph Longford, the long-serving British consul to Japan, wrote to the Times that the opera was “from the first an insult to the most sacred sentiments of the Japanese, galling and humiliating in every way.”
Lord Saumarez, a former secretary to the British legation in Tokyo, wrote that because the Japanese worshipped their emperor, the Mikado, as a divinity, “the very name given to this play is most offensive to the feelings of every Japanese, whatever disclaimer any individual Japanese, actuated by a somewhat exaggerated national politeness, may verbally make when assailed by an interested interviewer.”
W.S. Gilbert, a man who very much intended to give offense, was unbowed. He said, “Before long we should probably be at war with Japan about India, and they will offer me a high price to allow the Mikado to be played.”
Even after war with Japan and its emperor’s admission that he was not, in fact, a god, things remained uneasy. While serving as military governor of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur banned a 1947 production with an all-Japanese cast. (Here was a warrior more stringent than even today’s social justice warriors, who tend to focus their complaints on a lack of Asian cast-members.)
There have been other episodes of umbrage in the opera’s history (American audiences objected to its use of nigger, a word since dropped from libretti) but they are just more evidence for one simple point: It’s time for producers to stop worrying so much about upsetting audiences and instead focus on the performance.
The Japanese emperor may no longer be sacred, but cultural sensitivity increasingly is. It is true that the people offended by the Mikado are not the ones the opera intends to offend (that would be the British bureaucrat and other everyday villains) but they are the ones hypersensitive to the potentially offensive, and so always will be, however many compromises to political correctness producers offer.
This may mean that the Mikado stops being shown in its traditional markets, but I am optimistic about its future elsewhere. In 2001, the small Japanese city of Chichibu decided to stage the first production of the opera intended for a Japanese domestic audience (there had been scattered performances for foreigners before 2001). The priest in charge of the local shrine attended. This guardian of reverence for the emperor explained to the New York Times how he became a fan:
”The mikado of the opera is different in nature from the tenno,” Mr. Sonoda said, using the modern Japanese word for the emperor. ”In the case of the traditional tenno, he did not appear before the people, he hid behind a curtain. In the opera, the mikado is very kind and familiar to the people. He is very humorous, so we can laugh.”
Well, maybe in disenchanted Chichibu. Here in New York, we now cling to politically correct pieties—things that Gilbert and Sullivan inevitably, unmistakably—and delightfully—trespass.
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