Inkle and Yarico

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Inkle and Yarico is a comic opera first staged in London in August 1787. The music was by Samuel Arnold and the libretto by George Colman the Younger. The story follows Inkle, an English trader who is shipwrecked in the West Indies and saved by Yarico, an Indigenous woman. They fall in love, but when Inkle returns to his world he plans to sell Yarico into slavery to cover his debts while he marries Narcissa to gain social status. In the end Narcissa marries someone else and Inkle stays with Yarico. The tale was said to be based on a true account from Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657). A later version published in The Spectator (1711) changes Yarico to a Native American who is sold into slavery while bearing Inkle’s child.

The opera was a great success, with 98 performances at the Haymarket and 164 total on London stages by 1800. Yarico was famously played by Elizabeth Satchell, and Patty by Arabella Menage in early productions. It was performed in Dublin (1787), Jamaica (1788), New York (1789), Philadelphia (1790), Calcutta (1791), Boston (1794) and Charleston (1794).

In 1996, composer Roxanna Panufnik was commissioned to rework the opera for steelpan and modern orchestra for Barbados’s Holders Opera Festival, premiering on 15 March 1997 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and soloist Rachel Hayward. Other revivals followed: 1997 Straydog Theatre at the Cambridge Festival Theatre, with Tregear reconstructing the score; a 1998 remount at Battersea Arts Centre; 1999 Edinburgh Festival with a score by James McConnel and Natalie Tinn; 2006 Opera East at Magdalene College, Cambridge, reviving a version based on Arnold’s original score with libretto by Richard Luckett and orchestration by Benjamin Chewter. In 2015, John and Jodie Kidd produced a new musical version at the London Theatre Workshop, running February 17–March 28, with music by James McConnel and lyrics by Carl Miller. A teaser video appeared on YouTube.