Another matinee at Wolsey Theatre yesterday, this time a comedy about a man I’d never heard of (neither man nor deed) by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman. Called ‘Trial by Laughter‘, the play focused almost exclusively on the three trials in three days that a man called Hone faced in December 1817. William Hone was a threadbare but talented London pamphleteer who was both persecuted and prosecuted for seditious libel and blasphemy. The Crown claimed to be shocked by his spoofs of the Book of Common Prayer and Hone was tried and acquitted at three court hearings – on three successive days (for parodies of the Catechism, the Litany and the Athanasian Creed). It is not, as you would expect, a dry courtroom drama (it is Hislop and Newman after all) but a witty but perhaps overegged basis for full length play. The fact that it started life as a one hour radio play is probably an interesting facet of the play’s development, but although intermittingly amusing, I came away more interested in the poor but principled satirist than the play itself. Still worth a trip out, and some of the staging and all of the performances were on the whole very fine.
