A week after the Adelaide Festival premiere of Robert Leprage’s lavish Stravinsky opera, comes famed operatic director Barry Kosky’s production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s epic theatre parody of highbrow art, highbrowed people, and humanity’s contradictions: base instincts at war with higher order cognitive functioning. Approximately one hundred years since its premiere, a century where the USSR rose and fell, tickets to Brecht/Weill cost about as much as Stravinsky, though; beyond the reach of the masses its creators intended to mobilize.
Since its premiere in 1928, Threepenny Opera’s songs, like Mack the Knife, have infiltrated popular culture: they’ve been sung, divorced from their context, by Sinatra, Buble and Robbie Williams. Marxist politics have shaped the century. Its artistic innovations have seeped into the popular culture; even comic book superheroes like Deadpool speak directly to the audience now. On the surface, the tale of star-crossed lovers, criminal anti-hero Mackie Messer (Gabriel Schneider) and Polly Peachum (Cynthia Micas) is familiar: Polly’s parents Jonathon (Tilo Nest) and Celia (Constanze Becker) don’t approve of the match. There’s institutional corruption, with Chief of Police, Tiger Brown (Kathrin Wehlisch) taking kickbacks from Mackie. Like Brecht himself, Mackie has a bevy of mistresses, including Tiger’s daughter Lucy (Laura Balzer) and prostitute Jenny (Julia Berger). An inability to quash animal desires- lust, greed and jealously- lead to a downfall. The entire cast is outstanding, but Wehlisch and Balzer’s comic timing is particularly delightful. Upon the age-old narrative, Brecht and Weill constructed new ground.
While debates rage regarding whether Threepenny is an opera, theatre, or musical theatre, Brecht and Weill’s work can, in some regards, be characterised as a Weimar Republic era socialist equivalent of Gilbert and Sullivan: class structures are parodied and examined, operatic conventions are flipped on their head, the tunes, which draw from Bach, jazz, and Jewish traditional musical, are eminently hummable (perhaps, for Brecht, frustratingly so), and there’s even, eventually, a happy ending where the anti-hero is saved by a last minute pardon.
Unlike G and S, though, B and W, with epic theatre, broke theatrical conventions, and the fourth wall. Kosky’s performers, lit under harsh lighting on a stage where the Adelaide Festival’s stage wings are visible, audibly huff and puff as the climb the set’s maze of ladders and platforms, converse with the orchestra and the audience, name drop Adelaide, break into English, refer and point to the surtitle screens, poke their heads out from or perform in-front of the sparkling curtains; the “happy ending” mocks operatic happy endings. The audience should never be carried away into a fictional reality but rather remain cognizant of how the work’s political and philosophical messages can be carried away and actioned in the world outside: a world where, Brecht posited, social inequalities caused individual moral failings. Change the system, change the human condition.
While post-war baby boomers benefited from waves of democratic socialism, the 20s are again a time where the cost-of-living is sending the working class to the bread lines; where, instead of lords, there are landlords; instead of speaking about the plight of the proletariat, we speak of rights for renters. For many, the work has now transformed into simply “entertainment”; beneath this façade, it offers so much more.
The Threepenny Opera has one more performance this afternoon from 4pm at Her Majesty’s Theatre.
Get your tickets here
https://premier.ticketek.com.au/search/SearchResults.aspx?k=tHE+THREEPENNY
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