Burletta

Although it became easier to open new theatres within the City of Westminster after 1804, the big three theatres: Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Haymarket, still held the advantage. They were the only theatres allowed to stage, “regular drama,” that is, prose plays and spoken dramas, as opposed to musical and dance shows.

One of the things the newer theatres became known for was Burletta.

A Burletta is a brief comic opera. It is different to burlesque, which adapts an actual opera, classic play, or ballet into a comedy, usually musical, and which is usually quite risqué. Often, burlesque will quote, or pastiche, the original play, in order to mock it.

Burletta, by contrast, parodied the style of opera, theatre, or ballet, but did not parody an actual work. Burlettas were often known as mock-operas. Some of them were very cleverly written. All were entertaining and popular with audiences, providing songs, dances, jokes, and a story that was often convoluted and improbable, but with which the audience could identify.

An example of a Burletta from the 1770s that would still have been popular in the 1810s was, “The Recruiting Serjeant,” by Charles Dibdin, (pictured right). The audience would have loved the way this play poked fun at the recruiting tactics of the army, while also showing how a man might be driven to join up to escape his nagging wife.

In the early chapters of “Acting the Nabob,” Alice and Ben perform in a burletta, she as a dancer, he as the dashing hero who is twitted by the comic turns. (Making the impossibly wonderful romantic hero look foolish was another aspect of burletta that would have gone down well with the largely male audience.)

As jobbing actors, Ben and Alice might have been expected to perform in another comic work the following week. Instead, they find themselves heading north, posing as a wealthy  husband and wife and risking their lives to help bring down a gang of murderous conmen.

No longer playing for laughs, these roles may change everything.

Acting the Nabob was released by The Wild Rose Press in May 2025, and can be found here.