The Beggar's Opera 1728

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This is the review of the Beggar's Opera in the ultra respectable London Financial Times in 1972. (Unfortunately, 1972 paper glue left something to be desired.) Back then the FT did not see anything wrong with the still!

For the connoisseur, the Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. It is one of the watershed plays in Augustan drama and is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today. Ballad operas were satiric musical plays that used some of the conventions of opera, but without recitative. The lyrics of the airs in the piece are set to popular broadsheet ballads, opera arias, church hymns and folk tunes of the time. The first performance, on 29th January 1728, was on the Lisle's tennis court (where ever that was) and written in English as a protest against the heavy Italian and German operas.
 
Your editor writes: "1972 was the first time that I saw this play. It was by far the best spanking  I ever saw in it and Polly Peachum winced when she sat down after the spanking. I cannot remember for how long the play ran, but I presume that Lillian Watson was a sufficiant afficionado to take the repeated spankings, or very well padded. I have seen the opera again several times over the years since. Occasionally, there is a token spanking but, in most recent productions, it has completely disappeared. There also is a reworking of this opera by Bertold Brecht called the Three Penny Opera, where the spanking never occurs."
 
 
Link to the original MainstreamSpanking review