“Cuts, Cuts, Cuts” chant the actors that periodically scurry across the stage, one carrying a large cardboard pair of scissors. This stage business tells the audience of slashed funding to the arts, education, and welfare services in the service of austerity. As fiercely political as its eighteenth-century predecessor, The Busker’s Opera premieres in the wake of the alleged cultural damage wrought by austerity measures and continues the tradition of trenchant musical satire begun by John Gay at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre on 29 January 1728. The Busker’s Opera, a musical ‘inspired by’ The Beggar’s Opera, retains the engaging topicality of Gay’s phenomenally popular ballad opera. Brilliantly, Dougal Irvine shifts the setting from Newgate Prison and its pre-industrial environs to 2012 as London is in the grip of Olympic mania. Gay’s dashing highwayman Macheath becomes a charismatic busker and YouTube sensation. His gang of thieves is replaced by the ‘ninety-nine percenters’, a group of activists critical of the Olympic games and their capitalist underpinnings. In another ingenious move, Peachum and Lockit become respectively a billionaire media mogul and Mayor of London. The love triangle between their daughters and their enemy, the busker activist, is central to Irvine’s dynamic reimagining of Gay’s ground-breaking play.

The Busker’s Opera begins inauspiciously with a song summarising the plot and themes of The Beggar’s Opera. We are told that the message of Gay’s original is that there is crime and corruption among both the rich and the poor, but it is the latter who pay. True enough, but this song breaks a cardinal rule of writing: “show, don’t tell”. The song also alludes to the artistic legacy of The Beggar’s Opera, notably Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, a dark twentieth-century version of Gay’s play (playing soon at the National Theatre in London). The Busker’s Opera immediately picks up after this unnecessarily expository introduction, but as with Gay’s creation, plot is not its strongest point. Like the culminating events in The Beggar’s Opera, the climax, which takes place during the games’ closing ceremony, is openly silly.

The first of The Busker’s Opera’s interrelated plots details the self-interested machinations of Peachum and Lockit, who spend much of the play engrossed in backroom dealings, often via mobile phone. Manipulating public opinion in various ways, they work together to stage the games and suppress grassroots opposition. The corruption of politicians and the media is obvious (and hilarious) as the playwright mocks the hand-in-glove relationships among the rich and powerful. In The Beggar’s Opera, John Gay targeted England’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole initially took his ribbing in good part, but blocked the premiere of Gay’s sequel Polly and later introduced the 1737 Licensing Act, conceived to suppress subversive dramatic content. Similarly, Irvine also pokes fun at public figures: Peachum echoes media proprietor Rupert Murdoch and Lockit is a highly amusing caricature of former London Mayor Boris Johnson. From his costume to his cringe-worthy dancing, he elicits much laughter from the audience.

Irvine’s cynical portraits span the political spectrum however: the second plot line satirises Macheath and his ‘ninety-nine percenters’. Macheath is perfectly cast, as George Maguire (who seems to be channeling Russell Brand) is both charming and repellent as a narcissistic, womanising busker. Through the self-promoting Macheath, Irvine critiques problematic intersections between celebrity and activism. The busker’s cause itself is not summarily dismissed however. The ninety-nine percenters rail against greed and corruption among the one per cent and bemoan the plight of the homeless as London stages a very expensive ‘party’. Yet despite the activists’ bleeding hearts and good intentions, the big business games are a success, while a series of homeless characters die one-by-one and reappear on stage as angels in tee-shirts painted with wings. The ninety-nine percenters’ interventions are not just ineffectual but actively damaging to the people they claim to champion. Like the gang of criminals in Gay’s play who disingenuously boast of honour among thieves, the ninety-nine percenters are prone to in-fighting and quickly hand over Macheath to the authorities when a reward is promised.

Except for somewhat uneven dancing skills, the singing and acting in The Busker’s Opera is very good and sometimes excellent. Lauren Samuels, playing Polly Peachum, has an exquisite voice but her take on the character—an idealistic young activist and billionaire’s daughter—represents a lost opportunity for comedy. Playing Polly straight, she only gets close to eliciting mirth when she sings to a paper pigeon (recalling the profusion of bird imagery in Gay’s play). Though scholars have emphasised Polly’s innocence as the moral centre of the play, the heroine is unquestionably sincere in both her love and her values, but is also comically oblivious to her own ridiculousness. Unable to milk this earnestness for laughs, Samuels seems out of place in a cast of gifted comic actors. Natasha Cottriall, who plays Lucy Lockit, exploits the (admittedly more obvious) comic possibilities of her character. Her Lucy is delightfully unpleasant, written by Irvine less as a scorned mistress than a selfish and materialistic child of modern capitalism. Her hypocrisy comes to the fore when she croons a celebration of her pregnancy (“I’m having a baby, baby”) whilst strangling a homeless person. The enmity between Lucy and Polly, like other relationships in the play, is mediated by technology, their jealous insults exchanged by mobile phone. These contemporary touches clash with the rhyming dialogue that is used—and perhaps overused—throughout The Busker’s Opera (which Gay himself does not deploy in his 1728 smash-hit).

A bracing new take on Gay’s pessimistic romp through London’s underbelly, The Busker’s Opera captures much of the spirit of its eighteenth-century antecedent. Irvine’s play sacrifices little entertainment value in its multipronged satirical attacks on twenty-first-century problems and the timeless follies and failings of human nature. Though the satiric mode is perennially criticised for presenting more problems than solutions, Irvine’s musical attempts to do more than mockery, both within and beyond the performance. The producers of The Busker’s Opera ran an outreach programme called ‘Art Matters: Pass it On!’ that aimed to expand the theatre-going audience beyond the wine-sipping elite. The programme’s goal was to raise £10,000, some of which is channelled into free tickets for charities and youth groups. That’s what I call putting your money where your mouth is.

The Busker’s Opera is at the Park Theatre, London, until 4th June 2016.