Dead Dog/Live Show

DEAD DOG IN A SUITCASE (and other love songs)

Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, Tuesday 27th October, 2015

Kneehigh’s latest is one of their best.  It’s so good that I’m back to see it a second time less than a month after its visit to Birmingham’s REP theatre.  A new version of The Beggar’s Opera this is not a good advertisement for humanity but an excellent advocate for live theatre. You just don’t get this kind of stuff on the telly or Netflix. Unbridled in its theatricality, this exuberant production pulls out all the stops to tell its tale of establishment corruption, mirroring the personal corruption of individuals. There is live music, newly composed by Charles Hazlewood, lively choreography by Etta Murfitt, and puppetry by Sarah Wright – the eponymous dog is the cutest you’ll see (before his demise, of course!).

The ensemble cast is the heartbeat of the show, expending energy and displaying versatility to bring Carl Grose’s deliciously lurid script to irresistible life. Dominic Marsh is the amoral but amiable Macheath, our anti-hero, hired to assassinate the Mayor (Ian Ross) who knows too much. The town is really in the pocket of Les Peachum and his Mrs. Martin Ryder oozes sleaze as Les but it soon becomes apparent that it’s his wife (Rina Fatania) who wears the (leopard print) trousers. Fatania almost steals the show with her grotesquely hilarious performance. I would not like to meet her down a well-illuminated alley, let alone a dark one.

Beverly Rudd is a bluff Lucy Lockit – her song about being a ninja butterfly is a definite highlight in a show that is nearly all highlights. Hazlewood uses strains of Greensleeves and Over The Hills and Far Away from John Gay’s original work to enhance his own vibrant score, which has elements of funk, jazz, punk and ska all working together. It’s infectious.

Lucy Rivers has taken over from Patrycia Kujawska as the Mayor’s widow and perhaps the only ‘decent’ character in it – her stirring violin playing is an expression of her grief, complementing her emoting. Angela Hardie sings sweetly as the Peachums’ daughter Polly – until she turns to the bad, that is, while a bekilted Giles King is a lot of fun as corrupt copper Colin Lockit, squawking into his loudhailer. Best voice of the lot though must be Jack Shalloo’s as Filch. He also appears as other characters, each of them extremely funny.

Sarah Wright’s puppets are both charming and horribly satirical. A Punch and Judy show mirrors the live action (just as the live action is a caricature of our world) but unlike Mr Punch, Macheath is ultimately unable to defeat everything life chucks at him.  It’s a nasty, cesspit of a story. Director Mike Shepherd uses Brechtian ideas to entertain us. There is no revolution, the play says and I tend to agree. That should be its rousing call to action but it isn’t. It’s an entertaining wallow through the mire of our society – we enjoy these horrible people who have free rein to do what they like, and the sheer breath-taking impact of the performance exhilarates.

I will never see those anti-social wheeled suitcases in the same light. Every time I am nearly tripped by one, I shall suspect there’s a dead dog in it.

Dominic Marsh as Macheath