Southsea Shakespeare Actors are staging The Beggar's Opera at The Station Theatre, Hayling Island

The final production of the company’s 75th anniversary year, John Gay’s classic piece is a comedic play with music and song.

Co-directors Lauren Farnhill and Terry Wiseman first witnessed a magnificent, memorable production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford upon Avon in 1992 and have harboured a 30 year desire to bring it to the local stage.

Gay’s 18th century stab at the pretentions of Italian opera gives his audiences an insight into the low life existence of those surviving and operating in and around the environs of Newgate Prison in London in the early 1700s. Here pickpockets, highwaymen and petty thieves face impeachment, hanging or transportation, life is cheap, liquor runs freely and women ply their trade on the streets.

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Lauren says: ‘The inclusion of music – solos, duets and rousing ensemble pieces – has been a new challenge for the SSA, but the songs are accessible, entertaining, propel the plot and are thought-provoking, based as they are on the tunes and rhythms of popular ballads and ditties of the time.

‘Audiences can be assured of an evening of intrigue, fear, lascivious scheming and romance as they see the dashing hero Macheath hoping to avoid being entrapped into marriage and preferring instead to dally with colourful “ladies of the night” with an array of hilariously overstated names such as Suky Tawdry and Jenny Diver.’

The Beggar’s Opera is at The Station Theatre, Hayling Island at 7.30pm from November 9-12. Go to stationtheatre.co.uk.