Scabrous, virulent and gleefully profane
To wailing alarms, thugs and yobs hurtle on stage to loot the towering cardboard boxes, distributing their pricey contents among themselves with carefully practised choreography – until the onstage ensemble from Les Arts Florissants has been duly supplied with cardboard music stands and ipads. That’s the frenzied, arresting opening to Robert Carsen’s furious new staging – in fact, wholesale rethink – of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, first unveiled in Paris earlier in the year, and here the first of the Edinburgh International Festival’s trio of works from the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.
It sets the tone brilliantly for a scabrous, virulent, gleefully profane production that teeters between grotesque humour and genuine shocks. This is now, or the near future, in a London gone well to the dogs: the death penalty is back on the statutes, and the criminal world is doing very nicely. It’s every man for himself – or, in the mantra that gang boss Peachum and crooked jailer Lockit repeat, “What’s in it for me?”
There’s a pantomime energy to Carsen’s nervy staging, propelled along by his and Ian Burton’s rabidly colloquial updating of its text, with sly references to the Bullingdon Club and Theresa May’s shoes, not to mention its coke-snorting thieves and gallows selfie, even though gags about Harry and Meghan’s wedding sound rather dated by now.
James Brandily’s staging of towering cardboard boxes – we’re in Peachum’s warehouse of stolen goods – feels stubbornly flat, although characters stand out vividly against its monotone backdrop in all their grotesquery. Beverley Klein is a gin-swigging Mrs Peachum with a vibrato-heavy warble, and Robert Burt is a Del Boy-like Peachum with a Cockney snarl to his singing. Benjamin Purkiss as the duplicitous Macheath is – quite rightly – a preening, strutting peacock, though there’s a tight intensity to his tenor. His two warring lovers are the butter-wouldn’t-melt Polly Peachum (a gloriously fresh Kate Batter, who melds together Baroque ornamentation and Whitney-style melisma in her song delivery) and the feisty, constantly vaping Lucy Lockit (Olivia Brereton).
The Les Arts Florissants musicians under Florian Carré deliver crisp, nimble, incisive playing – not least percussionist Marie-ange Petit on spoons, bones, ratchets and plenty more.
Despite its raging energy, however, it’s a problematic production – one whose satire on corruption and self-interest among the elite can, at first, be easily overlooked. The fear is that it might simply be confirming ill-informed stereotypes about the underclass to a well-heeled Edinburgh audience. But by its surprise conclusion – which sees the crooks themselves assume power in an anarcho-socialist uprising – Carsen has made his point beyond doubt.