Our Island Home

Our Island Home is a one-act musical entertainment with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music by Thomas German Reed that premiered on 20 June 1870 at the Royal Gallery of Illustration. The piece has five characters and is "biographical", in that the characters in the original production played themselves, except that they were given personalities opposite to their actual personalities.

This work is the third in a series of six one-act musical plays written by Gilbert for Thomas German Reed and his wife Priscilla between 1869 and 1875. The German Reeds presented respectable, family-friendly musical entertainments at their Gallery of Illustration beginning in 1855, at a time when the theatre in Britain had gained a poor reputation as an unsavory institution and was not attended by much of the middle class. Shakespeare was played, but most of the entertainments consisted of poorly translated French operettas, risque Victorian burlesques and incomprehensible broad farces.[1] The Gallery of Illustration was a 500-seat theatre with a small stage that only allowed for four or five characters with accompaniment by a piano, harmonium and sometimes a harp.

Our Island Home takes its name from Alfred Tennyson's poem "". It is set on the shore of an island in the Indian Ocean. German Reed had hoped that Arthur Sullivan would set the music for the piece and had written to ask him. Sullivan requested a higher price than the Reeds could afford, and so Reed wrote the music himself.

This work introduced a number of the characters that Gilbert would use consistently in his later operas, including the overbearing, mature contralto and the meek, submissive baritone. Many of the elements in the piece are precursors to similar elements in Gilbert and Sullivan's famous 1879 opera, The Pirates of Penzance. The pirate "chief", Captain Bang, became the Pirate King in Pirates. Bang was also a precursor to the Frederic character, having been mistakenly apprenticed to a pirate band as a child by his deaf nursemaid. Similarly, Bang, like Frederic, has never seen a woman before. Also, he is affected by so keen a sense of duty as an apprenticed pirate that he is prepared to slaughter his own parents until the discovery of the passage of his twenty-first birthday frees him from his articles of indenture.

...
Wikipedia