Trial by Jury and The Zoo are paired at the London Coliseum from 4 to 12 March 2027, closing English National Opera's London season.
Trial by Jury was the first thing Gilbert and Sullivan made that worked. It opened at the Royalty Theatre in March 1875 as an afterpiece to Offenbach, runs under forty minutes, has no spoken dialogue at all, and takes apart the English legal system by way of a breach-of-promise suit in which the judge admits he got his position by marrying an ugly rich woman. It ran longer than the piece it was supporting. Everything the pair did afterwards is downstream of it.
The Zoo came a few months later, with a libretto by B. C. Rowe rather than Gilbert, and is the Sullivan curiosity: the same composer, a different writer, and a piece almost nobody stages. That is the argument for putting the two on one bill. Sullivan wanted to be taken seriously as a symphonist and resented the comic operas for most of his life. It is visible in how good the orchestration is.
English National Opera gives them at the London Coliseum from Thursday 4 to Friday 12 March 2027. Nine days closes the house’s London season, which opened with Angel’s Bone the previous October — a season that began with a Pulitzer-winning opera about trafficking and ends with two Victorian comic operas, which is either incoherent or exactly the range a national company should have. The Coliseum was built for the same audience these pieces were written for.