As audience members filed into York University’s Sandra Faire and Ivan Fecan Theatre on the 286th anniversary of The Beggar’s Opera’s original debut, one could not escape the unmistakable sense of confinement. Lighting effects produced prison bars on either side of the sombre hallway leading into the main auditorium, while security cameras alerted members that they would be under constant surveillance. At the auditorium’s entrance, staff of the “Lincoln Fields Correctional Institute” – a reference to the theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields where John Gay’s ballad opera had its first season – greeted members and electronically scanned their theatre programs. Occasionally, one of these programs would elicit an alarming beep from the scanners. The unfortunate audience member would then be shuffled down a darkened hallway by the staff toward (presumably) a different entrance. Settling into my seat and trying to ignore the distress of feeling like an inmate, I joked to my companion for the evening, “so, what do you suppose we’ve done?” A nervous smile was all I received in response.

While the unsettling prison backdrop might seem to undermine the rollicking humour of Gay’s satire in The Beggar’s Opera, in fact, the adaptation produced by James McKernan and directed by Gwen Dobie demonstrates a keen awareness of what made Gay’s original play so successful: its incongruity. With its novel combination of disparate literary forms – the tragic and the comic, the opera and the ballad, the lyrical and the satirical – The Beggar’s Opera works by unpredictability and surprise as it veers from cynicism to sentimentality, from solemnity to irreverence, and from raucousness to poignancy in the space of a few lines. Given the work’s dependence on combining forms and materials, York University’s production is appropriately an interdisciplinary one, effectively drawing on the efforts of the Departments of Theatre, Music, Dance, and Digital Media under the leadership of people like vocal coach Catherine Robbin, conductor Stephanie Martin and choreographer Michael Greyeyes.

Of course, the mixed form of the play also structures its content as The Beggar’s Opera both equates and inverts the high and low ranks of society in order to satirize them. It follows from the conflation of “high” and “low” art forms and social classes that, as Mr. Peachum, played by a compelling Brendan O’Reilly, suggests, “A rich rogue nowadays is fit company for any gentleman; and the world, my dear, hath not such contempt for roguery as you imagine.” An immensely popular invention with audiences, the combination of disparate theatrical and literary elements struck a chord with eighteenth-century theatre patrons, leading it to become the most successful dramatic work not just of the year but of the century.

Any adaptation of Gay’s work is forced to innovate on top of what was already an innovation for its day, and to Dobie’s credit, her adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera is equal parts fresh and faithful with the spirit of Gay’s work. In particular, while she preserves the unpredictability caused by the juxtaposition of clashing styles and generic expectations from Gay’s original, she also effectively reimagines this experience for a contemporary audience. At one moment, for instance, the audience is being carried away by the play’s original musical score, parts of which were filched from Georg Frederic Handel’s opera Rinaldo and Henry Purcell’s masque The Fairy Queen; the next moment, Crook-Finger’d Jack, played by an ebullient Leighton Williams, breaks out into a song and dance routine inspired by Beyoncé or Lady Gaga. At other moments, Gay’s eighteenth-century prose – which the cast brilliantly realizes, showing that Gay’s wit has lot none of its potency after nearly three hundred years – is interrupted by outbursts of colloquial arguments between prisoners. Recombination and play are modes that Dobie’s adaptation captures from Gay’s work particularly well.

Recognition is also something Gay’s original work emphasized, as it aimed to show that original work could be generated through a dialogic assembly of discordant pre-existing materials and forms: folk song, opera, comedy, adventure tale, country dance, tragedy, ballet, street ballad and farce. On another level, of course, Gay’s play encouraged audiences to recognize multiple and unexpected affinities between contemporary rogues like Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard, London’s most infamous criminals of the day, and the then-prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. These connections ultimately served to comically startle audiences into seeing similarities between thieves, politicians, courtiers, businessmen, and con artists. For contemporary figures like Walpole, these connections struck a nerve – a fact that contributed to the strict ban placed by the Lord Chamberlain on Gay’s play Polly, the sequel to The Beggar’s Opera. For today’s audience, direct parallels to the state of Toronto’s politics, Canada’s national affairs or the global economy are tastefully left absent but easily enough made. For example, the economic collapse engendered by the “South Sea Bubble” investment scheme in 1720, which served as an impetus for many of the criminal activities featured in Gay’s play, resonates closely enough with the recent crises stemming from the intriguing world of international finance.

However, it is important to remember that Dobie’s production is not simply an imaginative remake of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. Rather, it is a metatheatrical play about prisoners putting on a production of The Beggar’s Opera as part of a correctional program known as “theatre rehabilitation,” and the audience is continually reminded of this fact on multiple levels. The drab interior of the prison, replete with menial props of brooms, barrel drums, and moveable prison bars serves as one such indicator. Special praise is certainly due to costume designer, Celine Moniz, for creating a style of dress that is reminiscent of the eighteenth century (the panniers of Polly’s dress made of playing cards comes to mind) out of modern prison materials: plastic spoons, caution tape, mop frills, and grey scrubs. Even the orchestra donned prison garb, suggesting just how far the prison experience pervades the entire production. In addition to the security monitors on either side of the stage that are left on throughout the entirety of the play, the prison warden, Beckett Benjamin Graff, played by Andrei Borissenko, frequently wanders through scenes, providing directional support and keeping the prisoners on task. At other times, a television host, Pamela Parker, played by a lively Astrid Atherly, interrupts the production in an attempt to interview various cast members about the effectiveness of theatrical rehabilitation programs relative to their cost in tax dollars, rumours of medical experimentation on prisoners, the administrative procedures of the prison, and other topics that bring to the fore contemporary concerns about the politics of incarceration. At more dramatic moments, various prisoners would break out into fights during the middle of performing, requiring the warden’s and guards’ intervention. This experience was brought to a climax during the play’s intermission, where a prison lockdown complete with additional bars being lowered onto the stage, blaring alarms, glaring spotlights and prisoners escaping into the audience required everyone to freeze and lift their hands above their heads.

The intricacy of this prison experience is suggestive of Dobie’s most profound innovations in her adaptation of Gay’s work. First, while Gay’s play disrupts our conventional understandings of social and moral order, Dobie’s adaptation multiplies this effect, as she scrutinizes the concepts of order and disorder themselves within the confines of a prison. On the one hand, the disciplinary structure of the prison and the direction of the play seem barely capable of containing the confusion within. On the other hand, and far more unsettling, is the idea that the institutional structure of the prison promotes the very disorder it seeks to quell. During one of the bouts of violent outburst, the action pauses as the warden soliloquizes about his perplexity that his project of “theatre rehabilitation” is not having the results he expected after viewing the documentary “Shakespeare Behind Bars” (shakespearebehindbars.org). Commenting on the institutional deployment of drama for sociological purposes, Dobie’s Beggar’s Opera seems to suggest the limits of controlling or “rehabilitating” inmates with a literary form that encourages jouissance and freedom.

Most compelling, however, is Dobie’s direct inclusion, or perhaps implication, of the audience in the play. While the action of Gay’s original unfolded in and around Newgate prison – incriminating everyone from Polly Peachum to Sir Robert Walpole in the corrupt economy of buying, cheating, stealing and conning – his audience always remained at a safe remove from both the events and insinuations of the drama. However, in Dobie’s adaptation, the audience itself is imprisoned along with the performers, implying its role as an accessory in perpetuating many of the same social dynamics that Gay satirized nearly three hundred years earlier, and thus underscoring how little some things have changed between Gay’s time and our own. As the security monitors flanking both sides of the stage unsettlingly reflect the audience back onto itself, members can’t help but feel a sense of culpability in Dobie’s version when it rehearses, “Through all the Employments of Life Each Neighbour abuses his Brother…Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.”

While we have certainly come a long way since the injustices of eighteenth-century criminal life, marriage law, covert dissections and public executions, Dobie’s adaptation ultimately attests to the cultural resonance of The Beggar’s Opera, and its enduring power to unnerve and arrest its audience.

The Beggar’s Opera ran at York University, Toronto from January 28th to February 1st, 2014.