The Beggar's Opera

Solicitor J. Peachum, the boss of London’s beggars, is indignant when his daughter Polly marries Macheath, a charming bon-vivant mafia gang boss. Polly’s disobedience spurs revenge and Peachum forces Lockit, the chief of London police, to unleash a hunt in which the willing key informant is Jenny, Macheath’s former mistress and one of the many prostitutes with whom he shared joyous nights. But because Macheath has also promised marriage to Lockit’s daughter, the story of the confrontation of  power and love grows more and more complicated.

The intrigue of a father whose daughter refuses to be obedient, a confrontation of two rivals of the underground and the public order guardian who wavers between the two, as well as the involvement of a former (dis)enchanted mistress into a love triangle – this salacious story from the world of crime and prostitution was a means for the playwright John Gay to draw a complex political satire about the corrupt English society at the beginning of the 18th century. The decision to parody the form of the Italian opera, so popular at the time that English playwrights felt threatened by it, caused The Beggar’s Opera to be the most performed work of the time. It also prompted numerous adaptations and reworks, the two most famous ones are The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil (1928) and the modernist musical adaptation by Benjamin Britten (1948), but it is also worth mentioning the politically engaged (non-musical) drama by the Czech dramatist Vaclav Havel (1978). 

John Gay closed his Beggar’s Opera with the thought: “Through the whole Piece you may observe such a Similitude of Manners in high and low Life, that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable Vices) the fine Gentlemen imitate the Gentlemen of the Road, or the Gentlemen of the Road the fine Gentlemen.” Bertolt Brecht radicalised the dilemma: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” And it is this thought that encourages us in our decision to use Gay’s motifs to face the vivisection of today’s society. Inspired by all these adaptations, director Vito Taufer created his own script which he then developed with the creative ensemble during the rehearsal process. The songs were written by Iztok Mlakar and the music by Aleksander Pešut –Schatzi.