Review: TRIAL BY JURY/A MATTER OF MISCONDUCT!, Opera Holland Park

A thoughtfully selected double bill making up the operetta segment of Opera Holland Park’s summer season shows the genre at its technical best, but also illuminates its troubling shortcomings.

First up is Gilbert & Sullivan’s earliest operetta, 1875’s Trial by Jury, one of the duo’s more realist works, where they’re more focused on taking shots at courtroom hypocrisy than on constructing absurdist fantasy worlds. Here, the action is kept simple – a jury must oversee the case of a bride jilted by her pompous fiancé, and overcome their obvious biases against the latter in the process.

In John Savournin’s production, the stage is festooned with flashing lights and cues for the studio audience to “applaud” and “boo”, for we’ve been transported to some gaudy hybrid of Judge Judy, The Jeremy Kyle Show, and Family Fortunes. This conceit is appropriate, given the libretto’s gentle mockery of mass hysteria, but Savournin has combined several different sub-genres of reality TV and confused himself in the process. The chaos of a TV set also feels somewhat too grandiose a set piece to be awkwardly inserted into OHP’s relatively small stage behind the orchestra.

When it was first announced that Jury would be followed by a modern work, one might have expected something to drag operetta’s stock archetypes and their irreverent wordplay into the present. A Matter of Misconduct!, which first premiered at Scottish Opera earlier this year, makes an attempt that is valiant, and better than the Jury revival, if not entirely successful.

Composer Toby Hession and librettist Emma Jenkins have chosen as their subject a politician with the easily punnable name Roger Penistone (Ross Cumming), who’s enmeshed in allegations of financial fraud alongside his “Poundshop Gwyneth Paltrow” wellness entrepreneur wife (a marvellously campy Chloe Harris). Hession and Jenkins have certainly wrung clever sitcom-style humour out of some fairly dry PR shenanigans – this is maybe the first time there’s been an explanation of what a SLAPP is in an operatic patter song, and there are some very inventive rhyming pairs (“Your Highness” and “vaginal dryness”, anyone?).

Unfortunately, though, writing good political satire involves more than simply lampooning its targets’ buffoonery, and the libretto never gets much further than pointing out that the country has some vague sort of problem. Certain throwaway lines, about Penistone’s past sexual harassment scandal or a PR guru facing casual misogyny, are played uncomfortably for laughs, and as a result, an attempt at sincerity at the end via sobering real-life facts on a screen feels preachy and unearned.

Still, when they’re not trying to be something more profound than they are, both operettas can be very entertaining. Both casts luxuriate in the delivery of a cutting internal rhyme alongside a knowing facial expression, and both pompous Gilbert & Sullivan baritones (Richard Suart as the Learned Judge and Jamie MacDougall as the Defendant) manage the deceptively difficult task of not letting comic arrogance veer into kitsch. Hession conducts both works, and ekes out both the mock-seriousness of Sullivan’s courtroom music and the farcical Pink Panther-esque trumpet flourishes in his own score.

Trial by Jury and A Matter of Misconduct! represent a mastery of a particular kind of musical humour – just don’t expect them to have anything more to say.

Trial by Jury/A Matter of Misconduct! plays at Opera Holland Park until 26 June