A Chorus of Disapproval

Once upon a time there was a stage comedy called A Chorus of Disapproval, a clever, multilateral saga about a production of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera by a local amateur dramatic society, crawling with a modern suburban version of the twisters, shysters and adulterers presented by Gay with such brio. Enter Michael Winner, to take Alan Ayckbourn's vibrant original, ruin its point and its structure, and pour the cold porridge of his filmic imagination all over it. Now we have a great series of visual plugs for the charming seaside town of Scarborough, a very few moments when the humour and poignancy of the original escape unscathed, and a Rolls Royce cast of British actors who, except for Hopkins' ferociously frustrated Dafydd Ap Llewellyn and fine cameos from Briers and Jeffries, can't cope with either the heavily truncated script or Winner's cloddish, half-baked direction.