In a few years, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera will turn 100. It’s hardly likely to slide into obsolescence in the meantime. A scathing critique of ruling-class barbarism and capitalist corruption, it is a work that tends to suit the times, whatever the times. Ruling classes are always barbaric and capitalism is always corrupt.
Australian-born, German-based theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky returns to the festival he once ran with this Berliner Ensemble production: a sleek, sly and perversely sexy take on a show that feels tailored specifically to his talents. While ostensibly set in London, The Threepenny Opera reeks of Weimar Berlin, the seediness and cynicism of a society on the precipice oozing through every pore. Kosky often seems the master of the cynical gesture, his theatrical instincts honed to glittering disillusionment.
Brecht is complex in theory and tricky in performance – the world is haunted by the memories of terrible productions of his work – but when you get it right it feels naturally and deliciously entertaining. Kosky opens with a grand smirk, as a bejewelled head pops through a sparkly curtain to sing the key song the Ballad of Mackie Messer (better known in English as Mack the Knife). It’s a song about a killer, seductive and savage, announcing the show’s intentions as clearly as any neon sign.
Macheath, known to friends and associates as Mackie (Gabriel Schneider), is a local hood who shacks up with Polly (Cynthia Micas), the daughter of a stand-over man and controller of the beggars of London, Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (Tilo Nest). Peachum and his wife, Celia (Constanze Becker), are none too happy about this, and hotfoot it over to chief of police Tiger Brown (Kathrin Wehlisch) to demand justice. Sadly for them, Brown is besties with Mackie, having soldiered with him (tellingly) in India.
So begins a tale of amoral businessmen, traitorous sex workers and philandering criminals trying to outdo each other in depravity, popping out of the action to sing German cabaret songs about the system that’s turned ‘em bad. And make no mistake, Brecht’s beef here is entirely with the system, with its tendency to dehumanise and blame the poor while giving a surreptitious pass to the money-grubbers. The Threepenny Opera is a political tract, first and foremost – if not quite a communist manifesto, then certainly an anti-capitalist one.
Kosky is too much of an aesthete and a showman to be an agitprop kind of director – but he does manage to bring some bite and danger to the work. His colour palette is subdued, blacks and whites and red for blood, with Dinah Ehm’s highly textured costumes dripping glitz and glamour. The actors are gestural and expressionistic, pulling faces, taking knowing and extended bows. Stage violence is cartoonish, but somehow creepier for it.
Some performances get lost in the mayhem, while others are so pitch perfect they threaten to unbalance the play. Wehlisch is a masterful buffoon, bringing to mind the Keystone Cops via Elmer Fudd; every twitch of her brow is hilarious, but she never lets the audience forget the venality and avarice underneath. Becker makes a steamy and stony Celia, her songs textbook examples of the form. And Micas is a brilliant Polly, switching effortlessly from love-struck ingenue to hardened sceptic in the blink of an eye.
As the cocky playboy psychopath, Schneider is a knockout. Made up to look like a ventriloquist’s dummy, all wooden jaw and vacant grin, he’s both sexy and spiteful, nonchalant but also murderously determined. You want him to get off, but are then appalled when he does. It’s a performance that defines the whole, disgustingly seductive.
Musically, the show is brash and ballsy, with Adam Benzwi conducting a seven-piece band who also double as street toughs. Weill’s harsh tonalities, all that wind and brass, are softened by a pared back approach to the vocal lines – which in turn leaves room for the singers to spit their contempt into the lyrics. We are worlds away from Wagner’s high romanticism, with a sound that still feels strikingly contemporary.
Technical difficulties plague opening night, with dropped sound cues and some frankly shoddy prompt work with the surtitles. The script is dense and the banter rapid-fire and far too many lines are missed or late, throwing out the rhythm. For an expensively ticketed show that has played elsewhere and occupies such a prominent place in the festival, this is particularly objectionable. Later performances will want to address it.
Kosky is undeniably a genius, and he’s thankfully tamped down his tendency to juvenile goading (I’ve still not forgiven him for putting dildos into the hands of John Bell’s King Lear decades ago) to produce a Threepenny Opera of great urgency and panache. It’s still a profoundly uncomfortable work, challenging a largely wealthy audience not just to part with their complacency, but their pretensions to compassion and altruism.
One key song talks of food as the precursor to morality, the inference being that you can’t build a humanist society when people are starving. It immediately brings Gaza to mind, but also the homelessness and desperation on our own doorstep. You rarely get theatre as relevant as that.
The Threepenny Opera runs at Her Majesty’s theatre in Adelaide until 10 March, as part of Adelaide festival
