With what emotions, I wonder, must the wraith of John Gay have witnessed at the Kingsway Theatre the triumph of his opera. He can have hardly failed to find, after an interval of two hundred years, the enraptured reception of his work intensely gratifying. But he can equally have hardly failed to wonder what in that interval can have happened to his play. “This,” we can imagine him to have said, “is all of it, of course, perfectly delightful.” But it was for a very different thing that London was divided into two camps, and the Duchess of Queensberry was forbidden the Court. I wrote a political and social satire. I transported to the West Indies the most notable of my creations in “The Beggar’s Opera.” Mrs Trapes I placed in charge of an establishment which courtesy permitted me to describe as an “academy for young gentlewomen in song and dance.” Of Macheath I made a pirate chief, disguised with a blackened face, and wedded, to his no great comfort, to Jenny Diver. In the scandalous person of Mr Ducat, the colonel of the militia, I satirised British colonial administration. Polly Peachum, who had come to the island in search of her rascal husband, alone, I permitted to be an agreeable and virtuous creature. And by making her marry, after the well-merited execution of Macheath, the Indian Prince Cawwawkee, I established the superiority of the “noble savage” over the weak, cowardly, and self-indulgent white man. That was my opera. But of all this I find remarkably little in the version that Mr Clifford Bax has so elegantly adapted and Mr Nigel Playfair so successfully produced. “The social and political satire has been removed, No comparison is drawn between the virtues of the black man and the white. Macheath is never even threatened with the fate that I had prepared for him, but is restored in health and charm and vigour to the eager embraces of his faithful Polly. A good two-thirds of the play is not mine at all, and though I am highly sensitive to the charms of its many bewitching lyrics, I can claim but a small share in their authorship. It is all, as I have previously remarked, perfectly delightful; but what has happened to my play?” We like to think that Mr Gay must have, by now, realised how extremely bad his own edition was. We venture, whatever biographers may state, to discern in his work the presence of a genial unpretentious personality. By now, we say, he should have acquired a sufficient sense of detachment from the jealousies and rivalries and feuds of the early eighteenth century to realise that he himself had made a sad mess of it, that Clifford Bax is perfectly right, and that it would have been impossible for Macheath to die, or the divine Polly to be wedded to a black.