Flora Seymour

Beggar’s belief

Plus: Ravel’s L’enfant becomes dangerously glib in the hands of Magdalena Kozena at the Proms

issue 25 August 2018

Robert Carsen’s new updating of The Beggar’s Opera is a coke-snorting, trash-talking, breakdancing, palm-greasing, skirt-hiking, rule-breaking affair — and every bit as wearyingly tedious as that sounds.

Leaving behind the work’s original 18th-century setting, Carsen sets out boldly for present-day London (where the streets are paved with Brexit-related comedy gold), but in Ian Burton’s rewrite seems to land somewhere circa 1990.

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