by Anne-Louise Fortune
Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera is probably best known within the wider culture for introducing the jazz standard Mack the Knife to the world. The song’s enduring popularity has led to it being used across a wide range of genre projects, including in Alan Moore and Kevin’ O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as countless parodies. Even without this cross-medium proliferation, the plot alone of the original piece has a very strong fantasy element, especially in the closing scenes.
Written by Brecht from an adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera being prepared by Elisabeth Hauptmann, and with music by Kurt Weill, the use of the word ‘opera’ is a deliberate mislabelling for what is actually much more a work of Musical Theatre. This is just one of the contradictions inherent throughout the work, which here, at the Edinburgh International Festival, is presented by the Berliner Ensemble – Brecht’s own theatre company.
Slightly reimagined here by director Barrie Kosky, the broad strokes of the story remain the same, albeit it appears that the time setting for this production has been shifted to the 1950s. The female characters are strong, and the choices made when refocusing the story mean that we mostly avoid seeing women attacking women because of the actions of a man. Rather, here, the women both come to the realisation that it is the man who has behaved poorly.
Presented in German, with English supertitles, the production messes with our understanding of traditional theatre in a manner that reflects Brecht’s ideas of maintaining a distance between the audience, the actors, and the characters they portray. Brecht also embraced his friend Erwin Piscator’s notion of Epic Theatre, which continues here. The set consists of a number of enormous metal structures, each containing steps and platforms which become a set of stables, a bar, a bed, and a prison, as well as the various other locations and items of furniture required in this narrative. The actors climb, scramble, slide and balance on various parts of these moving, sliding behemoths. It’s disconcerting but brilliantly done.
To add to the epic scale, the huge stage of Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre is draped in a glittery curtain, plunged into darkness, and flooded with light to convey both moods and locations. Bridging the space between the audience and the actors is the small band of seven musicians, who are often incorporated into the storytelling.
Within the narrative, Gabriel Schneider has the difficult task of making the criminal philanderer Macheath into a sympathetic character. It’s a feat he manages to achieve, with the audience hoping for him to escape from prison and cheering him on when he does. The entire cast is superb, even as some of the characters embody the role of Fagan, rather than Oliver Twist, within this Dickens-esque world. This may make it sound as if this production is serious and worthy – it’s actually remarkably funny in a way that perhaps Brecht is not usually imagined to be.
This was a gloriously epic piece of musical theatre, with the familiar tune of Mack the Knife both incorporated and subverted throughout. If you have an opportunity to see this production, which was only here in Edinburgh for three performances, then it is highly recommended.
