by In a few years, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera will turn 100. It will hardly slip into oblivion in the meantime. A scathing critique of class barbarism and capitalist corruption, it is a work that fits the times, whatever the era. Ruling classes are always barbaric and capitalism is always corrupt.
Australian-born German theater and opera director Barrie Kosky returns to his former festival roots with this Berliner Ensemble production: a lean, edgy and sexually perverse take on a show that feels tailor-made for his talents. Ostensibly set in London, the Threepenny Opera anticipates Weimar Berlin, the seediness and cynicism of a dying society seeping through every pore. Kosky is often seen as a master of the cynical movement, his theatrical instincts clashing with a shimmering uneasiness.
Related: Review of the Golden Cockerel – a great opera about autocracy from Russia
Brecht is complex in theory and complex in performance – the world is haunted by the haunting memories of his work – but when you get it right it feels natural and deliciously entertaining. Kosky opens with a big smirk, as a bejeweled skull comes through a curtain of sparkles to sing the key song The Ballad of Mackie Messer (better known as Mack the Knife in English). It’s a song about a killer, seductive and savage, announcing the show’s secrets as clearly as any neon sign.
Macheath, known to his friends and associates as Mackie (Gabriel Schneider), is a local hood who falls in love with Polly (Cynthia Micas), the daughter of a man who stands up and is the controller of London’s beggars, Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (Tilo Nest). ). Peachum and his wife, Celia (Constanze Becker), are not too happy about this, and they call the police Tiger Brown (Kathrin Wehlisch) to demand justice. Unfortunately for them, Mackie prefers Brown, having been a soldier with him (intentionally) in India.
So begins a story of amoral businessmen, treacherous sex workers and treacherous criminals trying to outdo each other, escaping the action to sing German cabaret songs under the system gone bad. And make no mistake, Brecht’s beef here is squarely with the system, with its tendency to dehumanize and blame the poor and give the moneyed a pass. The Threepenny Opera is, first and foremost, a political tract – if not a communist manifesto, it is certainly an anti-capitalist one.
Kosky is too much of an aesthete and showman to be an agitprop director – but he manages to bring bite and risk to the work. Her color palette is subdued, black and white and red for blood, with Dinah Ehm’s highly textured costumes oozing glitz and glamour. The actors are gestural and expressive, pulling faces, taking knowing and extended bows. The stage violence is cartoonish, but in a creepier way to it.
Some performances get lost in the chaos, while others are so perfectly pitched that they threaten to unbalance the play. Wehlisch is a masterful buffer, bringing to mind the Keystone Cops via Elmer Fudd; every turn of her brow is funny, but she never lets the audience forget the horror and humor underneath. Becker makes Celia steamy and stony, her songs examples of the form. And Micas is a wonderful Polly, transitioning effortlessly from love-struck ingenue to hardened skeptic in the blink of an eye.
Schneider is a psycho cop as a cocky boy. Look up to look like a dummy of the ventriloquist, all wooden jaw and empty smile, it is sexy and spiteful, nonchalant but also determined murder. You want it to go away, but then you are horrified when it does. It is a performance that defines the whole, disgustingly seductive.
Musically, the show is relentless and musical, with Adam Benzwi fronting a seven-piece band who will also act as street stuntmen. Weill’s harsh tonality, all that wind and brass, is softened by a laid-back approach to the vocal lines – leaving room for the singers to pour their disdain into the lyrics. It’s a world away from the high romanticism of Wagner, with a sound that still feels very contemporary.
Technical difficulties affecting the opening night, with lowered audio cues and some hasty work on the open captions. The script is dense and the tune is absurd with far too many missed or late lines, throwing off the rhythm. For an expensively ticketed show that has played elsewhere and occupies such a prominent place in the festival, this is particularly reprehensible. Later performances will try to address it.
Kosky is undoubtedly a genius, and he has thankfully lost his bias towards the young (I still haven’t forgiven him for putting dildos in the hands of John Bell’s King Lear decades ago) Opera To produce a threepenny with great urgency and panache. It’s still a deeply uncomfortable work, challenging a mostly wealthy audience not only to give up their complacency, but their spouses of compassion and altruism.
One key song talks about food as a precursor to morality, concluding that you can’t build a humane society when people are hungry. It immediately brings to mind Gaza, but also the homelessness and desperation on our own doorstep. Rarely do you find theater as relevant as that.
-
The Threepenny Opera runs at the Queen’s Theater in Adelaide until March 10, as part of the Adelaide Festival
