We're used to bad musicals in the commercial theatre. Now they're starting to invade the National Theatre as well. Indeed, one spends much of the time while watching this trundling behemoth of a show wondering why anyone ever thought the world needed an update of The Beggar's Opera when Brecht and Weill did the job perfectly well.
Gay's 1728 original was chiefly an attack on the corrupt administration of Sir Robert Walpole. It also made the broader satirical point that the lowest of low life was a mirror image of high society. Update it to today's East End gangland, as Nick Dear does here, and you lose the plot. For a start, unless you're a raving Tory, we have a government more famous for prudence and caution than for sordid sleaze. Even the idea that gangland villains are a microcosm of high society now looks the oldest of hat.
Dear's ideas strike one as borrowed rather than felt: when a would-be honest cop cries to her boss "But how are we going to clean up London if we're as vile as the villains?" I couldn't help but think of Gary Mitchell's The Force of Change, where collusion is explored with genuine moral subtlety. Even as a piece of storytelling the show is feeble: it starts out as a by-the-book update of Gay, and then meanders into a mix of drug-snitching estuary fantasy and cod-Shakespeare. Dear starts out with Macheath and ends up with Macbeth.
Even musically the show is a non-starter. Where Gay had traditional ballads and Brecht had Weill, here we have sawn-off tunes by the normally reliable Stephen Warbeck that flit by unnoticed. And hard though Tim Supple's production strains to create an atmosphere of louche naughtiness, it never gets beyond cartoon decadence.
Real satire requires moral outrage: here the underworld is simply an excuse for camp sniggers. The actors do all they can but Alexander Hanson's Macheath seems little more than a bumptious Walter Mitty. David Burt as a rasping Woolwich Peachum, Clive Rowe as a garden-tending Mr Big and Elizabeth Renihan as a luscious Lucy come off best. But the show, which treats the gangland ethic as a huge joke, seems a scandalous waste of the National's precious resources.
Until June 10. Box office: 0171-452 3000. This review appeared in some editions of yesterday's paper.
