“We’re bringing women’s voices to the foreground in the sexiest and funniest way possible”

Polly, which plays at the Wardrobe Theatre on April 16-17, is a dirty, messy, highly physical adaptation of John Gay’s eponymous sequel to The Beggar’s Opera.

“Macheath ran off to an island to f*ck Jenny Diver. Polly Peachum, his wife, stands on the shore and summons up a storm.

“Join three weird women as they dance, drum, sing and slash their way through an adaptation of John Gay’s sequel to The Beggar’s Opera. Using bouffon, drag, and Berlin cabaret we present a work-in-progress showing that explores 21st-century politics and femininity through an 18th-century spyglass.”

Directed by Stephanie Kempson (Score, Pulling Out) and written by Marie Hamilton (The Cranes) with a score by Ben Osborn (Goldilock, Stock & Three Smoking Bears), Polly promises “a frenetic, heart-breaking look at love, loss and revenge.”

Here’s Stephanie to tell us more.

Tell us about John Gay’s Polly.
Most people won’t know Polly, but John Gay wrote The Beggar’s Opera, which a lot of people know in some way. I studied it at school, and people might also know it as The Threepenny Opera (from the 1920s version by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill), or as Kneehigh’s Dead Dog in a Suitcase [B247 review here].
And even if they don’t know one of these plays, then they probably know songs from one of these versions without realising it. Mack the Knife and Pirate Jenny in particular are very well-loved songs from Brecht’s version. So it’s been a really important text in our culture.
Polly is Gay’s sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, which was banned at the time because Gay had already riled the politicians with the latter. Obviously this meant Gay made a fortune from selling the script.
The story itself follows Polly Peachum to the Caribbean, where she’s searching for her husband Macheath – who at the end of The Beggar’s Opera had been transported for his many, many crimes, and had also been exposed as a bigamist.

And what’s different about your adaptation?
We’ve taken the basic plot and characters and just eviscerated the whole thing. Gay’s original plays were so brilliantly critical and satirical of their times, and we needed to change the form and the focus of the story in order to make it relevant to our society. Ours is largely songs, and it’s far shorter (from three hours down to about one), and less complicated.
We’ve jettisoned a lot of unnecessary characters, and brought into focus issues which we think are important: feminism, greed, colonialism, masculinity. Our version focuses on Macheath’s three main brides: Polly Peachum, Jenny Diver and Lucy Lockit. Lucy wasn’t in John Gay’s Polly at all, but we felt she’s too important to lose.
We’ve also called it Polly: The Heartbreak Opera because that’s kind of what it is: a critical look at heartbreak and how people get away with stuff in the name of love. Macheath has been running around messing with all these women’s hearts and lying, and it’s our turn to really take this story and ask why he does it, how he gets away with it – and what should happen to him.

And why are you making this show now?
Performer/co-deviser Marie Hamilton came to me with the idea. She wanted to use the text to make a bouffon show (a dark, grotesque and very satirical form of clowning) and she’d approached composer Ben Osborn (Fellswoop Theatre, Goldilock Stock and the Three Smoking Bears, Reservoir Mogs) and he was very interested too. Together we thought it was the right time to tackle this show, to bring women’s voices and stories to the foreground in the sexiest and funniest way possible, with loads of brilliant catchy songs that everyone would be humming as they left the show.
We were very inspired by the #MeToo movement, and we think it’s really important to find new and interesting ways to engage with this topic. It’s been easy to take a satirical look at the way we don’t listen to women, in fact we have a song called Women Talk Too Much, sung by our Boris Johnson-esque Mr Ducat to his shrill wife. It features the lyric “Aren’t women’s voices annoying, in this register I can’t respect.” I think there’s so much fun to be had in satire, and through seeing a show you can enjoy being told a story, enjoy the way the actors do it, and also laugh at the bizarre and weird contradictions in the way we behave.

As well as Ben and Marie, who else is working on the show?
We’ve got a stellar team. Polly is played by Madeline Shann from Sheffield, a multi-talented singer-songwriter, dancer and performer who has worked with RashDash (who did Two Man Show at Trinity last year) and was assistant director on Black Men Walking which toured to the Arnolfini.
We also have Katy Sobey, who is a performer Bristol audiences might recognise from Reservoir Mogs and Rocky: A Horror Show at The Wardrobe Theatre. I say ‘might recognise’ because she’s incredibly mercurial, she’s almost unrecognisable in her different roles, she almost disappeared into the role of Rocky. Already in the rehearsal process we get to see her transform from her Boris Johnson-esque character to Jenny Diver, Macheath’s pirate wife and hard-shelled ex-prostitute. Marie Hamilton plays Macheath and Lucy Lockit, among other characters, and has just been in Sally Cookson’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at West Yorkshire Playhouse. She trained at Gaulier in Paris and is a phenomenal actress.
Our designer is Sam Wilde, who designed Bristol Old Vic & ss Great Britain’s Spooky Ship Halloween Tour, where we worked together. He’s a brilliant designer who came out of Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s very esteemed design course a few years ago. Our lighting designer Ellie Bookham worked on the brilliant fringe hit We Are Ian by In Bed With My Brother. We’re also joined by producer Pamela Schermann and stage manager Emily Walpole.

What about the music for the show?
We cover a lot of a genres and have a lot of fun with it. In the show we have folk, jazz, soul, spirituals, pop, ballads, and rap battles. It’s been incredible fun writing the songs, finding inspiration for them and the characters in popular culture and then staging them. For example Polly has been massively inspired by early Britney Spears, that virtuous schoolgirl look but she’s clearly got sexual power and wants to use it. Polly gets her own Britney tune near the top of the show. The other two lead women have been inspired by Courtney Love, Taylor Swift, PJ Harvey and Peggy Lee. And Macheath, our villain, get his own Livin’ la Vida Loca-style introduction song. We have had so much fun doing this and we hope the audience has as much fun hearing it!

What’s your favourite song in the show?
It changes every day, but Love is a Terrible Thing is a beautiful, despairing ballad from the show, and I can’t get it out of my head. Yesterday I had the folk tune What’s the Matter With Macheath? in my head: the day before, it was Women Talk Too Much…

What’s been your main challenge while making Polly?
Cutting down the plot and making the songs work hard to tell the story, while also making them fun. We’ve lost so many great songs on the way. It’s also hard because we’ve had just three weeks to develop this show, so what we’re showing will be a work-in-progress and I just want to see this show fully done! We’ll be showing something that looks like a show but perhaps might need a small amount of further refining afterwards before we start trying to set up a tour.

You’ve been developing the show in Berlin…
We were lucky to get Arts Council funding, which has meant we’ve spent some time developing the show at TheaterHaus Berlin. We did some training with Nicole Kehrberger while we were there: she teaches bouffon and is a phenomenal woman. She pushed us to be ruder, braver and more truthful in the show.
It’s been brilliant to think about the show outside of the UK too. The German press reports Brexit very differently here, and we’ve been questioned and gently mocked about it numerous times. Because Polly is set in the Caribbean as the British were brutally colonising it, we’ve had to think about what we want to say about Britain as a world power. John Gay’s version brutally criticises Europeans as greedy, cruel and stupid, especially the men. We’ve kept that satirical edge in ours and set it in a mouldering holiday-resort version of the Caribbean.
We also watched a lot of German theatre while we were there, as much as we could squeeze in. We saw the weirdest cabaret at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, and the most incredible adaptation of the Greek tragedy Iphigenia at the political theatre Volksbuehne, created and performed by Syrian refugees.

What do you want audiences to go away with at the end of the night?
We want them to have fun, to laugh, to cry, to think about some important stuff – and also to reflect on how intense and beautiful it is to be human. And maybe humming one of our songs as they leave. Nothing much…

Polly is at the Wardrobe Theatre on April 16 & 17. For more info and to book tickets, visit http://thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/polly/