I’d love to see a new British musical with the grit, nerve and populism of John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera, set among the whores, thieves and hypocrites of Newgate Gaol.
Gay’s satirical smash hit confronted London’s taste for Italianate opera and political corruption with a flair worthy of its anti-hero, the noose-ducking highwayman Macheath. And Lucy Bailey is the director to revive it: her characteristically violent production starts as it means to go on, with portly lowlifes jumping on a criminal who’s already squashed flat and screaming beneath a slab.
Multi-Olivier-winning designer William Dudley has superbly urbanised the Open Air Theatre’s pastoral setting with gallows, tumbrels and a sloping bed so vast it’s almost big enough for all Macheath’s groupies.
David Cave’s fit blarneying Irish highwayman, who cheats on all his women and marries two of them, is a superinjunction in breeches: in Gay’s cautionary underworld, his ill-used bedfellows expose him to the noose, not internet ridicule.
Beverly Rudd and Flora Spencer-Longhurst shine as Macheath’s rival wives. They unite to save him from their violent criminal fathers (Jasper Britton and Phil Daniels on hoarse cockney form) though, in the end, Spencer-Longhurst’s dim yet lovely Polly Peachum wins a cruel victory over Beverly Rudd’s brazen, heavily pregnant Lucy Lockit.
Gay’s ‘opera’ famously contains 69 folk tunes. They’re presented artfully on authentic instruments by period specialists the City Waites. But the heavy amplification required in this sound-swallowing outdoor space makes it impossible to slip naturally in and out of the snatches of music and sometimes gives them a hard musical-theatre edge that the score of lovely snippets shouldn’t have to support.
Still, the tears, fears and recriminations of this underworld soap opera are as salty and raucous as ever in this roiling Hogarthian spectacle.