CityLife

Out of Joint and Sydney Theatre Company: The Convict's Opera

IT'S not just in recent times that scruple-free theatrical producers have tried to wring every last penny out of a valuable property.

The massive box office success of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera - by some reckonings the biggest hit of the 18th century, which is not a statistic you see every day! – spawned many, many unofficial sequels and several examples of what the people at Disney would most likely refer to as ‘re-imaginings’, most famously, of course, The Threepenny Opera.

So Max Stafford Clark, Out of Joint and writer Stephen Jeffreys are working in a long, if not necessarily honourable, tradition here, taking Gay’s musical satire – sometimes described as the world’s first-ever musical – and updating it to a performance on board a creaking convict ship bound for Australia.

 To pass the time, a disparate group of desperadoes, including arsonist Grace Madden (Ali McGregor), “coin clipper” (i.e, counterfeiter) Ben Barnwell (Brian Protheroe), political prisoner Eddie Cosgrove (Peter Cousens), confidence trickster Bett Rock (Catherine Russell), common or garden thief Amelia Whiting (Amelia Cormack) and “man of mystery” Harry Morton (Juan Jackson) are taking parts in a production of The Beggar’s Opera, directed by William Vaughan (Glenn Butcher) under the orders of Captain Macnaughton (Nicholas Goode).

Even clergyman Bartlemy Wilkins, also played by Goode, has been pressed into service.

As Jeffreys’ version slips in and out of Gay’s text with no little ingenuity, this motley crew also provide the music, rewritten versions of the likes of Sailing, You’re So Vain, I Fought The Law and even Ian Dury and The Blockheads’ I Wanna Be Straight, rendered on harpsichord, acccordion and drum.

This is all very clever and jolly to watch (although perhaps a bit nerve-wracking if you’re one of the audience members actually seated on the stage!) but, to this onlooker at least, it felt strangely uninvolving and, if you’re not that familiar with The Beggar’s Opera itself, none too easy to follow.

The Convict's Opera is on at the Library Theatre until Saturday, February 7. Call 0161 236 7110.

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