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. In a production originally created for Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Peachum, Macheath and their band of criminal lowlifes are the kind of East End cockney schemers even DCI Jane Tennison would have found it nostalgic to investigate, while corrupt cop Lockit is more Pirates of Penzance than McMafia. Sure there are the obligatory hoodies and trainers (fishnets and pleather for the girls), and plenty of references to Meghan Markle, Theresa May and ‘strong and stable government’, but it still ends up feeling like an edgy gangster update as imagined by your gran.
When it premiered in 1728, John Gay’s satire was the ultimate succès de scandale — a two-fingered musical salute not only to the political elite, but also to culture’s ruling force: Italian opera.
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