The award-winning Ipswich Gilbert & Sullivan Society are proud to present The Yeomen Of The Guard or The Merry Man and his Maid.

We’re thrilled to kick off a brand-new season at the Ipswich Gilbert & Sullivan Society as we celebrate our 95th year, and this time we’re diving into one of G&S’s most dramatic and operatic works — The Yeomen of the Guard (or The Merryman and His Maid) - a show that the Society has only done six times! 

16 th Century England. Phoebe, the daughter of Sergeant Meryll of the Tower of London Warders, is pining for the love of a celebrity prisoner, the dashing Colonel Fairfax. But Fairfax has been falsely accused of sorcery, and is due to be executed, while Phoebe is being ardently pursued by the Tower’s Assistant Tormentor, the
unprepossessing Wilfred Shadbolt. Meanwhile, Sergeant Meryll is desperately trying to avoid the unwanted attentions of Dame Carruthers, the Tower’s housekeeper.

On the day of Fairfax’s appointed execution, strolling players Jack Point, a jester, and Elsie Maynard, a street singer, arrive at the Tower. Jack and Elsie, Phoebe and Wilfred are all soon drawn into a series of plots involving the condemned Fairfax.

There follows a tangled tale of intrigue, deception and unrequited love, played out beneath the forbidding stone walls of the famous prison fortress. The story will end with happiness for some, but, for one in particular, a broken heart.

The Yeomen of the Guard, written at the height of the pair’s fame, is widely regarded as Gilbert and Sullivan’s masterpiece. Gilbert took his comic inventions to a different, more touching human level, and Sullivan’s gloriously melodic score ranges from the stirring March of the Tower Warders to the plaintiff ballad, I Have A Song To Sing, O.