The eponymous fake utopia in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is created because a discontented, disenfranchised populace finds “no harmony, no contentment”. Mahagonny is a promised land with beer and sex apparently freely on tap, a place where you can get anything if you can pay for it. Jeremy Sams’ lively translation (“such a hell hole”) and the libertarian slogans (“your choice, your freedom”) displayed prominently in Jamie Manton’s production point up the Trumpian resonances. And indeed the whole scenario could scarcely be more alarmingly relevant to our time – just as the genre of Zeitoper was intended to be.
For all the power of the dramatic punch it packs, however, there’s a potential for monotony in didactic theatre that this production doesn’t entirely manage to obviate. There are some inventive touches – not least the idiosyncratically accoutred, empowered sex-workers and the brilliantly conceived embodiment of a hurricane (choreographed by Lizzi Gee, danced by Damon Gould) – but there are also long tracts of the first and second acts where the momentum sags.
