The Beggar's Opera O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College

John Gay's Beggar's Opera of 1728 is and will forever be an important landmark in the history of opera. In setting out to guy the traditions of Italian opera Gay substituted spoken dialogue for recitative, and poached songs, traditional, popular and with famous names attached (including Handel's and Purcell's), for his melodic material. The work was an immediate hit, and the success of Gay's scatter-gun targeting of holy cows is attested to by the interest the work still evokes.

But Gay wasn't actually a composer. The arrangement of the airs for the premiere is generally credited to Johann Christoph Pepusch, and composers since then have never seemed shy in turning their hand to the shaping of the work to accommodate it to later musical taste.

Sean O Tarpaigh's new Opera Theatre Company production, with suitably seedy sets by Paul McCauley, uses the version which Benjamin Britten created in the late 1940s. The composer once described this as more fun to write than to listen to, and that, I'm afraid, is exactly how it sounded under conductor Brian MacKay in the new OTC production. MacKay showed clear concerns about balance between stage and pit, and managed to allow most of the words to come across cleanly. But, from a musical point of view, the results were neither one thing nor the other, not Brittenish enough in colour or texture to be interesting or diverting, but yet with the 18th-century origins well enough swamped for the effect to be disorientating.

With the musical rewards so effectively obscured, the burden of carrying the evening fell effectively on the singers' stage skills. Kathleen Tynan achieved an ingenue freshness as Polly Peachum, and Hal Cazalet had a presence and animation that mostly held the attention. But, elsewhere, there was a predominance of heavy over-acting, and a deadly flatness that various attempts at whipping up the pace failed to dispel.

In short, it was like an 18thcentury revue where all the connections and references have been lost, and nothing but a line or two of updating (a reference to Charvet shirts) has been substituted to lift the spirits.

Tours to Dundalk ( Wednesday), Derry (Friday, February 16th), Mullingar, Enniskillen, Galway, Tralee, Cork and Kilkenny. For further information contact 01-6794962