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Black-Eyed Susan by Douglas Jerrold, in a new version by Carl Miller, Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, 11-22 September 2007.
When Dickens reviewed a revival at the Royal Marylebone Theatre of his friend Douglas Jerrold's play Black-Eyed Susan in The Examiner on 12 May 1849, he pointed out how influential and massively popular this nautical melodrama had been since its first production in 1829 at the Surrey Theatre: 'of the many nautical dramas that have come and gone...there is probably not one but has had this piece for its model'. This continued to be the case: Gilbert and Sullivan drew on it for HMS Pinafore in 1878, Herman Melville's novel Billy Budd (1891) was inspired by it...