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Erin Harrington reviews The Deadbeat Opera, presented by Free Theatre, adapted and directed by Peter Falkenberg, at the Pump House, Friday 6 September 2024.
Where Free Theatre’s 2023 adaptation of Woyzeck offered misery on tap, their new companion work, The Deadbeat Opera, is presented to us overtly, in the show’s opening preamble, as a low-life, low-budget (black) comedy for our times. The two works are in clear conversation, sharing much of the same creative personnel and artistic sensibility, the former’s grim tone retooled into something more playful and tongue-in-cheek.
This production is a collage of John Gay’s satirical ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Bertolt Brecht, Elizabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill’s lauded play with music The Threepenny Opera (1928), and some more contemporary music and concerns at around a 1:3:1 ratio. For the most part, the adaptation simplifies the earlier works’ storylines, and borrows liberally from earlier scripts and translations. Mr Peachum (Aaron Boyce, in great charismatic form), the self-proclaimed ‘beggar’s friend’, is ostensibly a man of charity, but runs London’s network of panhandlers and grifters with an iron fist. His daughter Polly (Sarah Clare Judd) has run off to secretly marry gentleman criminal Macheath (a very feline Hester Ullyart), aka Mack the Knife, in a parodic makeshift ceremony attended by Mack’s gang of criminals. Corrupt cop Jackie Brown (Chris Carrow), old wartime friend of Mack, butters his bread on both sides, first attending the wedding but then trying to hunt Mack down in a whorehouse, Mack’s old pimpish haunt, at Peachum’s behest. Nineteen songs and cabaret numbers pepper the show, frequently offering ironic contrasts to or commentary on the dramatic action.
Stylistically, the production embraces distancing effects that will be familiar to Free Theatre regulars: stilted and exaggerated modes of performance, odd juxtapositions of tone, deliberate framing of scenes, the inclusion of musicians as actors. The strongest elements for me are the many musical numbers, in particular an electric performance by recent NASDA grad Judd. As Polly, she delivers barnstorming, girlish, somewhat feral renditions of two of the best songs from The Threepenny Opera, “Pirate Jenny” and “Barbara Song”. It’s captivating; give that woman a cabaret show.