This chapter reviews some of Maconchy’s most celebrated staged vocal works to tease out her tendency to inflect these works politically. Turning briefly to The Three Strangers (1957), The Departure (1961), The Birds (1967–68), as well as other collaborations with librettist Anne Ridler, the chapter examines transformations the composer expresses at simultaneous registers – whether poetic, thematic, or structural. The chapter further compares the political messaging in these works with her teacher Vaughan Williams’s ‘morality’ opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which sets much of the same symbolism extended throughout Maconchy’s oeuvre.