★★☆☆☆
The first joke is in the title: John Gay’s scabrous 1728 work is not an opera. The Beggar’s Opera was devised to mock opera singers and opera audiences, the former mincing to endless arias in an unintelligible language, the latter affecting to enjoy it for snob points. To really get home the point, however, Gay’s show put criminal lowlifes on stage and suggested we might admire them even more than the heroes of the opera house. What’s more, he put up a mirror to a corrupt political establishment and asked his audience in plainest English to decide who the real crooks were.
Now comes The Beggar’s Opera for the Brexit era. Or so this production for the Edinburgh International Festival from Paris’s Théâtre des