THE "secret" was kept from the community company of 200 until the Friday night.

They had signed up to rehearse a play in three days, to be concluded with a public performance on Bank Holiday Monday.

All would be revealed at 9pm: they were to speed-rehearse a new twist on The Beggar's Opera, John Gay's 1728 ballad opera in three acts, first performed in York that year at the wonderfully named Bank's Cockpit Without Bootham Bar.

Rather than three acts, writers Richard Hurford and Philip Goulding cut Gay's satiric musical play into five slices, each to mark a landmark at York Theatre Royal. And so we had a plethora of Peachums and Polly Peachums and lots of Lucys and Lockits to perform edited highlights from the text, bolstered by smartly witty new material that sent up the prevailing style of theatre-making in five ages of the Theatre Royal's history, from 1744 to the present day.

All were accompanied by the York Theatre Royal Choir, assembled in the pit with a small orchestra. Both responded superbly to the musical direction of Madeleine Hudson to play a prominent role in the success of a show that moved with a sprightly turn of pace, bags of exuberant energy and evident enjoyment in taking part in such briskly whisked entertainment.

Overseen by Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden, the Bank Holiday Play united the directorial forces of the Theatre Royal and York companies Pilot Theatre and Riding Lights, who produced remarkable results from such a crammed rehearsal schedule.

Volunteers helped with wardrobe, lighting, sound and prop-making too, while drop-in craft sessions in the foyer produced spectacular paper wigs and hats to add further wit to Anna Gooch and Lydia Denno's set designs through the years.

Maria Gray, from the Theatre Royal Studio production of The Machine Stops, linked the scenes as The Author, pungent smelling and increasingly pugilistic as the play changed through the ages beyond the writer's control and patience.

Riding Lights' Paul Burbridge led off the merriment with the The Original Beggar’s Opera from 1728, a boisterous, unruly, populist start with Paul Osborne to the fore as the bullish Peachum.

Frolicsome larks were had in Juliet Forster's "reversed production", set in 1782, where the women played the men, such as Emmie Gibson's swaggering Macheath, and bearded men showed plenty of leg and cheek as the women.

Pilot associate director Katie Posner's cast for a melodramatic Act 3 in 1899 was suitably over the top, with Andrew Isherwood's Macheath caught between Charlotte Wood's Lucy and Fiona Baistow's Polly.

Agit-prop theatre in 1975 was wonderfully spoofed with flair and flares in Julian Ollive's Act 4, recalling the heyday of 7:84 and Dario Fo, and the night ended with RashDash Theatre's Charlotte Bennett and her 2016 cast having fun with today's world of interactive theatre and instant social media responses, led by Paula Clark texting a running commentary with amusing, exasperated hashtags.

The Secret Bank Holiday Play will surely return after this knockout debut.