John Gay's Beggar's Opera was a theatrical sensation when it was first produced at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln's Inn Fields in January 1728. In that first season it ran for a record sixty-two nights; it was the play most often performed throughout the eighteenth century and it continued to be revived until the 1880s; in the twentieth century it inspired adaptations by writers as various as Bertolt Brecht, in his Threepenny Opera, and Alan Ayckbourn. The play's early success was partly due to its novelty.