Review: The Threepenny Opera
“Some are in the darkness…others in the light”
We see the moon and the moon sees us…and the shark with the teeth pearly white. One minute in and an orchestra introduces that most recognisable of songs: Kurt Weill’s Mack The Knife or Mackie Messer as it is known in its native source text; a piece on people and their amorality. A disembodied face shines as ‘The Moon Over Soho’ (Josefine Platt), suitably elevated betwixt glittering curtains. Those four world-weary yet entertaining minutes set the tone. Then suddenly, the societal structure of which the moon sings protrudes: inflexible, delineated, skeletal. A structure without sinew or tissue. A construction in progress. A machine for living…on-stage or off. Each person hierarchically valued as decreed by a strict system of rigour.
“What keeps man alive? The fact that millions are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed.”
Indefinitely set, Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (translated by Elisabeth Hauptmann) occurs at a time when the bourgeoisie is well established. The play’s theme is the bourgeois as gangster, the gangster as bourgeois. Everyone is a commodity and the police move to protect those who constitute the order, and against those who are victims of it. This is a forerunner society to the readily familiar capitalist society of the 20th century where one reads ‘businessmen’ for the bourgeois. Macheath (a lithe shape-shifting Gabriel Schneider) is an entrepreneur who lives at the expense of his employees: recognisable as petty thieves. He does business with the capitalist, Peachum (Tilo Nest), whose daughter, Polly (Cynthia Micas), he approximately marries. Spelunken-Jenny (Bettina Hoppe), a prostitute he pimps, entrepreneurially sells him to the authorities thereby demonstrating an equitable arrangement: each regarding the other as their property to be traded…like any other commodity. In such a world, fidelity is a frivolous cost, so in addition to Polly and Spelunken-Jenny, Macheath is having an affair with Lucy (Amelie Willberg): the daughter the High Sheriff of London, Brown (Kathrin Wehlisch), whom Macheath pays to ignore his crimes. Set beneath the veil of comic sentiment, all people are shown as effects of an abusive system whilst at the same time colluding in it. Even down to the beggar whom at the outset commoditises his hideousness only to hand over the fruits of his alienating behaviour to Peachum in exchange for a wage. The vultures wait and prey on us…but we ourselves are vultures to others. Finally the old myth plays its last by coming to Macheath’s rescue: a pardon from the King’s messenger on horseback. In the end, the bourgeois order cannot be seen to fail.
“Shakespeare? This is Brecht!”
This beautiful yet astonishing production by The Berliner Ensemble directed by Barrie Kosky remains fastidiously faithful to Brecht’s vision: to demystify the theatre causing the audience to make dialectical moves by questioning societal codes and representations. Kosky succeeds in enlisting the audience as experts - the current corrupt state of British politics elicits within us a pleasurable sense of dramatic irony which on some level might have pleased Brecht but on another would surely have dismayed him, since the ‘message’ within the play contains an accommodation with the current state of the nation. Kosky has retained Brecht’s verfremdungseffeckt by breaking the fourth wall, and having actors demonstrate a character’s plight without provoking any personal act of identification, resulting in an intersection of many codes. It successfully catches the audience out in their moments of emotional investment, removing all traces of catharsis.
Yet Weill’s alluring music and lyrics has an unintended effect: they act as a narcotic and pass unimpeded into the realm of the ‘pop song’ where words are sung by the masses in absence of their meaning. It is much evident in the environs of the Edinburgh International Festival. Brecht’s intent of reminding audiences of the distance between themselves and the stage is partially undone by the cabaret style of Mack the Knife which sits comfortably within the old theatre’s walls. No matter. The lasting impression is that of an extraordinary character, Macheath, who falls then rises to protect the status quo so that class conflict is avoided. Or as their French neighbours might say: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The Threepenny Opera played at the Edinburgh International Festival 18th-20th August.