Deathless humour is a rarity. While Jane Austen, Shakespeare and maybe Chaucer can still make us laugh across the centuries, lesser masters struggle. WS Gilbert being, dare I say, a case in point.
His earliest surviving Sullivan collaboration, Trial by Jury, has been playing in the Studio Live season – which is ENO’s attempt to plug the gap in its financially straitened schedules with small, cheap shows that offer opportunities to newcomers. And Trial by Jury is undoubtedly a small, cheap piece, at barely 40 minutes running time. But it’s a monumental bore: a floundering confection about breach of promise (the Victorian jape of jilting your fiancée), which might bear some interest as a prototype for ideas that become the tropes of later, full-grown Gilbert and Sullivan, but otherwise falls desperately flat. And desperation is the tone of Matthew Monaghan’s production at the ENO rehearsal studios in West Hampstead.
