Dominic Marsh in Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs) at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds and Touring. Picture: Steve Tanner
Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs) continues at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds until 7 November and tours until 2 March 2016.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
There is always a price.
If you update John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in such a frenetic and raucous style, nuance and subtlety will be lost.
Not that Kneehigh’s Total Theatre approach concerns itself with subtlety. When you fire both barrels at political assassination, exploitative employers, Punch and Judy, gleeful polluters, Cabbage Patch Kids and sadistic policemen, you leave little room for reflection.
However, the packed West Yorkshire Playhouse audience loved it. They ‘oohed’ the thrills and ‘aahed’ the pathos.
Their responses were the result of the pace of the action and the cleverness of the mise en scéne. The device of the dog of the title is a case in point (sorry). As the number of suitcases (stuffed with a carcass, cash or getaway clothes) proliferates, there is much business with one being substituted for another. Who will have which when the denouement comes?
Such an ensemble piece really defies any foregrounding of individuals – it seems that all can sing, dance, act, play an instrument and move sets (!) – but naturally some roles carry greater weight than others, while all contribute.
Rina Fatania as Mrs Peachum is brash and loud. She dominates the stage using her physical presence as a weapon and showing surprising flexibility in her dance moves.
Dominic Marsh is a charismatic and insouciant Macheath. No sooner has he married the the luminous Polly, than expediency demands that he should marry Lucy. Conscience clouds his thoughts for a moment, but doubts are easily dismissed.
Angela Hardie, as Polly, sings a querulous soprano, wearing a white dress, that locates her as the ingenue. Until, that is, she experiences one betrayal too many and she joins the general corruption of humanity, assuming control of Macheath’s gang.
Charles Hazlewood’s score is a key element in what is probably more of an opera than John Gay’s original. I counted five musical styles – folk, rock, reggae, dubstep, grime – before giving up the cataloguing as futile. ‘Greensleeves’ appears too, just as it does in the original, to comment ironically on the violence of the action.
Michael Vale’s set and design have to accommodate imaginary landscapes as diverse as a pier, a prison cell and gallows, canning factory, disco, and Punch and Judy booth, with ‘professor’. The ubiquitous scaffolding makes all that possible.
Director Mike Shepherd and writer Carl Grose have created a Beggar’s Opera for our time with all the disgust for humanity of the original. I am not sure who would be helped if we took the actors’ final injunction to ‘Tear It All Down’ seriously, but we know we have experienced an abrading evening of theatre.
Mike Tilling
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