(0)
(0)
(0)
(0)
(0)John Gay
Author
Description
"The Beggar's Opera is a free-wheeling, highly politicized adaptation of John Gay's well-known eighteenth-century work of the same name. The play, reminiscent of Havel's earlier Garden Party and The Memorandum, is up to his best satirical standard. Like the Brecht/Weill Threepenny Opera, Havel's play uses an underworld milieu to explore the intermingled themes of love, loyalty, and treachery."--Jacket.
Author
Description
Polly Peachum and 'Mac the Knife' Macheath, a career criminal, have a rocky relationship, considering how Mac may be already married and Polly's father, a racketeer who controls and exploits London's beggars, would like to see Mac hanged. Based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera, it is set in Victorian England's Soho at the time of Queen Victoria's coronation but satirizes the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic.
Description
"The critical protest against "fustian, bombast, and moral hypocrisy' staged in the eighteenth century by certain irregular, satirical kinds of comedy is well represented in this collection of ten burlesque plays of the period. The Duke of Buckingham's The Rehearsal (1671), with its ridicule of the rhymed heroic tragedy then dominating the theatre, established a tradition to which some of the most gifted writers contributed. 'Regular' comedy was soon...