The presentation of The Shoemaker’s Holiday as an Elizabethan museum-piece reached its apotheosis in 1967, with the Minnesota Theatre Foundation’s commission of a 24-song ballad-opera adaptation of the play that used rhythmic combinations and popular melodies in the tradition of sixteenth-century English ballads. The opera was premiered at Minneapolis’s Tyrone Guthrie Theatre with a conventional production, which was roasted by Time magazine as relying on ‘the broad byplay of slapped buttocks, knowing winks and donkey laughs – not exactly the elixir of dramatic life’.³¹ The music of the ballad-opera itself had a better critical reception. Dominick Argento’s score used simple orchestration – nine instrumentalists – and a melodic style that, in ‘The Lute Song’, approximated the figuration of an Elizabethan lutenist. The climax was the penultimate number, ‘The Pancake Bell Song’, a choral piece that the All Music Guide praises for its ‘chiming chord clusters calling the cast to a huge pancake breakfast’.³²

While productions of The Shoemaker’s Holiday up to the 1960s focused primarily on the play’s comic and melodramatic elements, that decade also saw the beginning of a tendency to focus on its darker side – particularly its class tensions. A 1964 production at the Mermaid in London presented the upper-class lovers as ‘posturing ninnies’ and the King as ‘pansified and narcissistic’.³³ The most recent professional production in London, directed by John Dexter at the National Theatre in 1981, also mined the more jarring aspects of the play. Though it competently handled the comic scenes on a lavish set designed by Julia Trevelyan Oman, the production’s most memorable moment came with the return of Ralph from the French wars. As Anthony Parr notes, ‘Ralph threw open the top half of a stable door at the back of the set and received a tumultuous welcome. He then threw open the lower half to reveal one leg missing’.³⁴

The Shoemaker’s Holiday returned to New York’s professional stage in 2005, when it was performed under the direction of Peter Dobbins at the Storm Theatre, a small ‘black-box’ off-off-Broadway setting. Unlike Welles’s production, the play was performed uncut. Dobbins’s interpretation underlined the comic potential of not just Eyre and Firk but also the female characters. The Wall Street Journal observed that Amanda Cronk, the actress playing Sybil, ‘makes the funniest faces imaginable’.³⁵ But the production emphasized the play’s darkness as much as its coarse comedy. One review claimed that, unlike Welles’s knockabout interpretation, the production struck ‘a perfect balance between bawdiness and deep feeling’.³⁶ Some of this ‘feeling’ seems to have been shaped by opposition to the US war in Iraq and the heavy burden carried by working-class soldiers, sent to battle by well-heeled leaders who have avoided combat themselves: the same review noted how the production didn’t ‘ease over the implications of Ralph’s having to fight in the bloody conflict’ that Lacy has ‘bought his way out of’.³⁷ If nothing else, the Storm Theatre production shows how The Shoemaker’s Holiday need not be regarded simply as an Elizabethan museum-piece. It is a play that can also critically engage enduring social tensions and problems.