This feminist and modernised pop musical adaptation of John Gay’s once-banned 18th century ballad
opera is vibrant, energetic, and sends up anything and everything going. The performance was
presented by Sharp Teeth at the Lowry, Salford.
Four female performers played all the characters between them, on Sam Wilde’s simple set
featuring some glitter and neon and extendable palm trees. The cast had taken the characters and
plot-line of John Gay’s forgotten sequel to “The Beggar’s Opera” and created their own script from
it, with a great deal of irrelevance and caricature – particularly for the male characters! Eighteen
original pop songs were composed by Ben Osborne, and the general effect was of a hen party in the
Caribbean with beer-bellied drag kings and beatbox pirates. It was bonkers, but immense fun.
Taking a sort of narrator role was Madeline Shann as The Poet. Dressed as an uber-elegant
Elizabethan jester, she glided around the staged spraying sardonic looks, and guided us from one
ludicrous scene to another. This is a story about Macheath’s three wives all coming to track him
down after he’s been transported to the Caribbean for his crimes and then set up a successful
pirating enterprise. Trafficking, sexual harassment, and a pregnant woman swimming across the
Atlantic Ocean all feature: – Shann’s almost unmovable face and dry voice kept everything plausible.
Polly Peachum, just eighteen and having her “Hello”-magazine style wedding with her East End
gangster parents in attendance, was played with great verve by Eleanor Nawal. She got the tone of
the overly excited upper-crust debutante (her parents had sent her to an expensive convent school)
perfectly.
Jenny Diver, the hard-nosed prostitute and businesswoman, was given sharp dynamism by Norma
Butikofer. This was doubled with Butikofer strutting around in tight Union Jack shorts as Mr Ducat,
the governor of the island, who beneath the comedy also had an unpleasant line in sleazing onto
hapless indentured housemaids.
Lucy Lockitt, the pregnant jailor’s daughter who helps Macheath escape, was played with daft
warmth by Marie Hamilton. Hamilton doubled as the sly matron Mrs Trapes, who gets Polly into
trouble on the cruise ship and then sells her to Mr Ducat once on shore; and she triumphed as
Macheath himself, portrayed as an older manipulative and misogynist Lothario in tasteless flashy
jewellery and clothing.
Hamilton is seven months’ pregnant in real life, and featured this in Macheath’s costume by having a
large exposed protruding belly – as many middle-aged men do. Charmingly during the performance,
Hamilton junior woke up and spent ten minutes doing a very noticeable baby dance behind the
tightly-stretched skin of Hamilton mater’s stomach, upstaging everything else on the stage. (Never
work with children or animals.)
Director Stephanie Kempson kept a tight handle on a wildly riotous show, and the spirit of John Gay
lived on once more.
Reviewer Thalia Terpsichore 14/5/24
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