Patience

Featuring Sullivan’s most beautiful music, Patience is the sixth collaboration – and the funniest – Gilbert pits the straight-laced ideals of the Victorian era against the passions and indulgences of the 1870s Aesthetic Movement, and ridicules both!

The rapturous maidens of the village seek beauty and perfect artistic expression and spurn their confused (and decidedly non-poetic) military suitors for Reginald Bunthorne, a moody and handsome poet. However, Bunthorne only has eyes for the simple milkmaid, Patience. The problem? Bunthorne’s artistic ways are all just an act to attract women to him – he doesn’t even really like poetry! Besides, Patience is in love with her childhood sweetheart, Archibald Grosvenor, who really is a poet, but she feels she cannot marry him because he is too perfect. How will this conundrum resolve?

Patience ran for an astonishing 578 performances opening on April 23, 1881 at the Opera Comique later moving to D’Oyly Carte’s new theatre, The Savoy, the first theatre in the world to be lit entirely by electric lights.