Every age gets the culture it deserves, so they say – a truly terrifying thought in our own era of Big Brother and Bad Girls: The Musical – yet within the flux of fashion and its relentless novelty there are works that persist, tugging at the skirts and heartstrings of each successive generation until claimed as their own. These are the true touchstones, the orphans of our culture, and alongside Romeo and Juliet and Don Juan sits perennially, grimy-faced and grinning, The Beggar’s Opera.

John Gay’s wildly popular 1788 musical satire on the London underworld was reworked most famously by Brecht and Weill as The Threepenny Opera, and has since reappeared in renderings by Peter Brook, Vaclav Havel, Benjamin Britten, and most recently in the joint Sydney Theatre Company/Out Of Joint creation The Convict’s Opera.

Written by English playwright Stephen Jeffreys (The Libertine, Lost Land), The Convict’s Opera sets a performance of Gay’s original play within a framing narrative, following the voyage of a convict ship to the colonies, and the fortunes of its prisoners and crew. As the ship approaches Australia, so the lives of its passengers draw closer to those of their theatrical characters.

The plot makes an overt gesture to Timberlake Wertenbaker’s classic account of the colonies’ first play, Our Country’s Good, and cheeky references in this direction add further layers to this palimpsest of a show. Where Our Country’s Good was elegant and meditative however, The Convict’s Opera is an altogether less refined creature – a vehicle for popular entertainment that makes no attempt to sharpen or update the satire of Gay’s original. Rendered by a cast of ten supremely multi-talented actors/musicians, the result is as slick and dynamic a piece of pantomime as you’re likely to see, successfully transforming a prim Oxford audience into a cheering mob of Italian opera-goers.

Faithful to the conventions of 18th-century ballad-opera, in which popular songs, arias and dances of the day were press-ganged into a makeshift score, The Convict’s Opera shamelessly samples from the best of all musical eras, so that when the singers pipe up it is as likely to be with Neil Young or Carly Simon, as a baroque aria. Dissenters will find the result fragmented and jerky, but such is the intelligence of Max Stafford-Clark’s direction and the collective skill of the cast (who between them not only only act, sing, and cross-dress, but play the harpsichord, zither, violin, recorder and guitar) that the energy and direction of this riotously anachronistic drama is never in danger of flagging.

With its quick dialogue, tight harmonies and gloriously self-conscious wit, The Convict’s Opera is a theatrical convenience shop of instant gratification. It may be exactly what we want, but this virtuosic romp of a show is rather more than we deserve.