Synchronicities

I toyed with the idea of taking the dvd of The Beggar’s Opera to my mother-in-law’s last weekend. Starring Laurence Olivier it was Peter Brook’s directorial debut (he went on to direct the 1963 Lord of the Flies), and was released in 1953.

Subtitled A Highwayman’s Tale, it was a contemporary piece when first written and published by John Gay in the late 1720s.

In the end I decided not to take it. When would we get the time to watch it, I asked myself? What I didn’t ask was, would I have the time to read the playscript? which I found in a 1923 facsimile edition on my mother-in-law’s book shelves. Well I did, as it happens.

Bound with the Opera was a sequel, Polly, of which I hadn’t heard tell, and I read that too! Polly, the eponymous heroine of the slightly later play, was the unhappy wife of Macheath, the Highwayman of the first. In this sequel she is seen having fled (as advised somewhere in the earlier play) to the West Indies to make a new life for herself. MacHeath is there too, disguised as the ‘black pyrate’, Murano. In a convoluted plot he and his pirate band end up fighting an alliance of colonists and Indians for control of, well, almost everywhere in the Caribbean it seems!

Polly has been sold into sexual slavery to a colonial landlord, but his wife has allowed her to escape, disguised as a man. She is on the trail of MacHeath, with whom she is still in love, a love that outlasts all she, and we, get to know of him, right up to his capture and execution, at which point she begins to favour the Indian ‘Prince’ on whose side she had been fighting.

Throughout the story, Polly has been an example of innocence, but not stupidity. She has displayed all the qualities of honesty and virtue that the characters in The Beggar’s Opera  have despised and perverted. In this second play she finds an echo of her qualities, not in the colonialists, nor in the pirates, but in the rather stereotyped ‘noble savages’. It’s a worthy play; but read as a much more earnest piece, as if the light, comic-satirical tone of the first had worn thin to its author. It throws up a couple of sequences that caught my attention in particular.

The first of these is a sort of prologue, in which the writer – cast as ‘the poet’ – discusses the wisdom, and possible folly, of writing the sequel in the first place, with one of ‘the players’. Surprisingly modern ideas are examined, or perhaps not so surprising on reflection, about whether it is right to venture a sequel that might not in itself be worthy, but which will succeed on the back of the earlier piece.

The second comes near to the end when MacHeath, not yet revealed in his true identity, is captured and questioned by the Indian chief, before, unrepentant, he is sent to his death. This, I thought, had more than a whiff of modern life about it…. So I share the relevant lines of the longer scene:

CHIEF: Would your European  laws have suffer’d crimes like these to have gone unpunish’d?

MACHEATH: Were all I am worth safely landed, I have wherewithal to make almost any crime sit easy upon me.

***

CHIEF: Would not your honest industry have been sufficient to have supported you?

MACHEATH:  Honest industry! I have heard talk of it indeed among common people, but all great genius’s are above it (apostrophe, his, not mine!).

CHIEF: Have you no respect for virtue?

MACHEATH: As a good phrase, Sir. But the practicers of it are so insignificant and poor, that they are seldom found in the best company.

CHIEF: Is not wisdom esteem’d among you?

MACHEATH: Yes, sir, but only as a step to riches and power; a step that raise ourselves, and trips up our neighbours.

CHIEF: Honour and honesty, are not these distinguish’d?

MACHEATH: As incapacities and follies. How ignorant are these Indians! But indeed I think honour is of some use; it serves to swear upon.

CHIEF: Have you no consciousness? Have you no shame?

MACHEATH: Of being poor.

CHIEF: How can society subsist with avarice!  Ye are but the forms of men. Beasts would thrust you out of their herd upon that account, and man should cast you out for your brutal dispositions.

MACHEATH:  Alexander the Great was more successful. That’s all.