The Beggar’s Legacy

This chapter traces the impact of the 1920 revival of The Beggar’s Opera on a wide variety of texts, ranging from Brecht and Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper and Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of Disapproval, to BBC dramas of ordinary life, the early productions of Theatre Workshop, Charles Parker’s radio ballads, Osborne’s The Entertainer, and some television plays of Alan Plater and Dennis Potter. It suggests that Gay’s ballad opera, rooted in folk song, provided a model of articulated dramaturgy that raised questions about the nature of authenticity, and that could be adapted by differing media to disintegrate the conventional form of the musical. This open structure responded to the purposes of cultural politics, in particular the needs of a provincial, and sometimes working-class, aesthetic.