The succinctly titled Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and Other Love Songs) is Kneehigh’s modern retelling of The Beggar’s Opera. Though this version, written by Carl Grose and composed by Charles Hazlewood, has elaborated a great deal on the original, at its core this is a faithful thematic adaptation. Dead Dog is a story of hypocrisy, as the swaggering and corrupt upper echelons of society persecute the crimes of the commoners whilst going unpunished themselves.

The setting is a rundown crime-ridden city whose main features are a dilapidated pier, a brothel and a poorly-constructed polluting pilchard cannery. It is located somewhere between the gangster-strewn seaside of Brighton Rock and the teetering end-of-world ruins of Beckett’s Endgame.

Musically, the production is a violent mishmash of styles that occasionally circles back to the eighteenth century. To highlight the abject dystopia that this production inhabits, the style of Hazlewood’s compositions are cacophonous, crashing through several genres including but not limited to thrash metal, acid jazz, grime, and industrial electronica.

This collapsing civilisation is brought to life by a fine cast of performers, as one comes to expect from Kneehigh, who here integrate actors, musicians and grotesque puppetry on stage. The charming charlatan and hitman MacHeath is played with aplomb by Dominic Marsh, Angela Hardie displays a tremendous vocal range for her numbers as the innocent Polly, and Georgia Frost shows off an intimidating talent for physical comedy simultaneous to carrying several tunes as the grifter and dogsbody Filch, to name just a few highlights.

Everything draws to a roaring close and it makes quite a spectacle but I do think the more nuanced themes of the piece are lost slightly within the pomp. The Beggar’s Opera ended on the macabre observation that if the rich were to hang for their crimes as well as the poor, everyone would be dangling from a gibbet. By contrast, Dead Dog in Suitcase decides that since the last good man is dead, the world is utterly irredeemable and should come crashing down.

The themes of the play are highly relevant now with its searing contempt for a broken society and those exploiting their way to the top. You’ll be screaming for bloody revolution over a compilation of ska, bordello jazz and dubstep.    ★★★★★    Fenton Coulthurst   26^th June 2019