Review: The Convict’s Opera
February 26, 2009
Date reviewed: 24 February 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
Few playwrights are more skilled than Stephen Jeffreys in the art of recreating a text for the contemporary stage, as in, for example, his classic adaptation of Hard Times. Similarly Out of Joint and its director, Max Stafford-Clark, have already staged one play, adapted from an existing source, about convicts in Australia performing an 18th century comedy: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s splendid Our Country’s Good, based on The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally.
Such is the background to The Convict’s Opera, a joint production with Sydney Theatre Company that premiered last September in Sydney and is now spending a week at the Courtyard theatre of the West Yorkshire Playhouse as part of a three-month UK tour. The spine of the play is The Beggar’s Opera, rehearsed and staged by convicts aboard ship bound for Australia in 1812. It is performed for the most part without updating, except that the songs are a surprising and sometimes amusing mix of John Gay’s original borrowed airs, folk songs and 20th century pop songs from Ian Dury to Bacharach and David. The reaction to the modern songs – chuckling at the variants on familiar tunes – probably parallels that of the 1720s audience hearing what Gay had done to ‘Lilliburlero’ or ‘Greensleeves’.
Simultaneously the stories of the convicts are played out, many of them given a monologue to place their criminality within an unjust world. There is friction between the convicts, the battle of the sopranos is re-enacted in other terms, relationships wax and wane and plots are hatched and abandoned, but there is no coherent storyline outside The Beggar’s Opera and the progress of voyage and rehearsals. Ultimately Harry Morton, the ex-slave playing Macheath, is taken over by the character to the extent that the ending of the opera builds into a cry for freedom in the new country.
Stephen Jeffreys’ respect for his sources is total: the fact that The Playmaker/Our Country’s Good also lies behind The Convict’s Opera brings a sly homage with a reference to another convict company possibly rehearsing The Recruiting Officer, Keneally/Wertenbaker’s play of choice. The music under Felix Cross is outstanding: cast members supply supple, evocative accompaniments (mostly string instruments and a miniature harpsichord), there is some fine a cappella singing and it comes as no surprise to find that Ali McGregor (a sweet-voiced Polly/arsonist Grace Madden) and Juan Jackson (committed and intense as Harry/Macheath) both have operatic backgrounds.
Though operating in an unnecessarily limited space, with the stage cut in two by a semi-transparent wall and little use made of the area beyond its central arch, some of the set pieces, like the raid on the coach and Macheath’s betrayal by his womenfolk, work splendidly, the pseudo-improvised invention reminiscent of Stafford-Clark’s period romp for the RSC, A Jovial Crew. Ensemble playing is excellent, with Brian Protheroe’s sterling Peachum (Ben Barnwell the coiner) fit to grace any production of Gay’s original, Catherine Russell’s gap-toothed, pipe-smoking Bett hysterically fanciful in the tawdry finery of his wife and Glenn Butcher suitably epicene as the playmaker who revels in the role of Mrs Vixen.
-Ron Simpson
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