Arts: Comedy opera is all at sea.

Byline: Catherine Jones

JOHN Gay's The Beggar's Opera is getting a re-working at the hands of Hollywood star Cate Blanchett's theatre company.

Instead of the satirical ballad opera being set in the grimy underbelly of early 18th century London, the action in the re-named Convict's Opera has been transposed to the belly of a ship transporting its hapless human cargo to Australia.

Blanchett and husband Andrew Upton's acclaimed Sydney Theatre Company has joined forces with Out Of Joint - the UK's leading theatre company dedicated to new writing and regular visitors to Liverpool - to co-produce the production.

The opera, re-worked from Gay's original concept by Stephen Jeffreys, brings together what is being billed as an 'extraordinary cast' of talented actor-musicians (including thesp Brian Protheroe and Kath and Kim's Glenn Butcher) drawn from Britain and Australia and under the direction of theatrical veteran Max Stafford-Clark.

Promising an evening bursting with "infamy, intrigue, fun and romance", the musical comedy centres around a group of convicts ordered to put on a show set in the criminal underworld of London that they've left far behind.

Cue stormy seas and scenes, reluctant cross-dressing and a score played live on an eccentric combination of instruments.

Seventeenth century ballad operas took the idea of grand Italian opera but made them accessible to ordinary folk by setting the lyrics to popular broadsheet ballads, opera arias, church hymns and folk tunes of the day.

Jeffreys - who previously penned The Libertine for both Out Of Joint and the subsequent film version starring Johnny Depp - and musical arranger Felix Cross have taken this idea and run with it.

The result is a score that combines the folk tunes of the original production with the likes of Sailing, the McCartney-penned Mary Hopkin hit Those Were The Days, 500 Miles, You're So Vain, and I Fought the Law.

The Convict's Opera sails into the Liverpool Playhouse from March 10-14.