The current repertory of the ‘Berliner Ensemble’ includes the famous operata-cabaret – Die Drei Groschenopera, ‘The Threepenny Opera’. I recommend this to any leftists finding themselves in Berlin. Owing to its small, old ‘vertical’ design, the theatre has good viewing from even the cheapest seats – ‘the gods” – unless labelled as restricted. First premiered in this theatre in 1929, this outstanding production was directed by Barry Kosky, until recently the chief director of the Komisches Oper. I will discuss the origins of the ‘3Groschenopera’ focusing not only on Brecht but also on Weill; review this production with a short synopsis; and then try to place the work within Brecht’s dramatic theory.
Origins of the work
Many discussions of this work incorrectly see Brecht as the sole creative architect. In 1927–28, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht’s then lover and secretary, translated John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” (1728). It concerned a band of robbers in London, and scandously criticised the “moral degradation of society” and the Sir Robert Walpole administration. Its songs became wildly popular in 18th century London. Brecht took the idea over and got Kurt Weill to write new music.
That music was key to its success. Brecht had composed and sang songs since his school days, often consciously imitating Frank Wedekind and fairground performers. But the musical collaboration with Weill took the ballad-music to a new level. Weill’s father was a cantor, and by age twelve he composed and staged concerts. After the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, he joined Ferruccio Busoni’s composition class. By 1925 Weill was famous for incorporating American dance-music into his compositions. Weill first worked with Brecht when the Baden-Baden Music Festival commissioned him in 1927 for Mahagonny (Ein Songspiel). Weill set himself in the words of Arne Stollberg, against all the ”[n]arcotic, foggy, opiate of Wagner’s music” (Programme notes, Brecht Ensemble p.33). Certainly you know at least one or two of the songs from this work.
Lotte Lenya (1899-1981) as a working class girl of 4 years, performed with a circus troupe. She married Weill in 1926 to “quell gossip”, and in 1929 premiered the role of the prostitute Jenny in ‘3Groschenopera’. In the 1930 film of Die 3Groschenoper (directed G.W. Pabst) she famously sang “Pirate Jenny”, originally written for the character “Polly”. Likely the only song in the opera even approaching a near-revolutionary position, it unleashes a maid’s pithy hatred of those who have exploited her. She dreams and gloats of their being butchered by her pirates. Weill’s compositions soon outraged the Nazis and in March 1933 he slipped into exile. Lenya and Weill divorced soon after. Brecht with his wife Helene Weigel also became refugees.
It is still commonly thought that Brecht injected the politics, while Weill provided pretty tunes. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Weill independently believed that the music, play and libretto should interact to entertain and to instruct. In 1929 Weill outlined:
“With the Dreigroschenoper we reach a public which either did not know us at all or thought us incapable of captivating listeners… Opera was founded as an aristocratic form of art… If the framework of opera is unable to withstand the impact of the age, then this framework must be destroyed. In the Dreigroschenoper, reconstruction was possible insofar as here we had a chance of starting from scratch. We wanted above all to restore the primitive form of opera… How can… especially song be used in the theatre? We solved the problem in the most primitive manner possible… I was faced with a realistic action and had to use music in opposition to it, since I do not think that music can achieve realistic effects. Thus we either interrupted the action in order to introduce music or deliberately led it to a point where singing became necessary.. This entailed a drastic simplification of the musical language. I had to write music that could be sung by actors, i.e. laymen.”
Stephen Brook, “An Anthology of Opera”; London 1995; p.471
Weill’s view is very close to the later well known Brechtian theory of Entfremdung. Usually its rendered as the “distancing effect”, or the “alienation effect”. But the word “defamiliarization” is a better translation, as originated by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky in in 1917 “Art as Device” (“Art as Technique”). (John Willett, ed & Trans.; Brecht on Theatre, (New York; 1964; p.91). We return to this later.
A short reprise
The story-line revolves around two crooks in Victorian-era London. The stage has a bright blue glittering streamer curtain which effectively acts as a “fourth wall” to be sliced open and re-stitched repetitively, as actors smash back and forth through it – breaking ‘illusions’ of reality. Another staging element is a set of narrow tubular frames, almost like gym bars. Tightly spaced, the actors deftly weave in and through them as needed, even if with impossibly high clunky heels!
The start – the curtain is partially penetrated by a spotlight onto just the wispy whitened face of Josefin Platt – a “Moon over Soho”. She quietly sings the famous “Ballad of Mack the Knife”. Thus is the infamous killer “Macheath” or Mackie Messer (‘knife’) introduced. A fragment of Brecht singing this exists, but better known are the famous later 1960s versions by Ella Fitzgerald in 1960, or Louis Armstrong .
In this performance all the songs are delivered with panache combining musical chops, humour and at times emphasising deadly political wit. Each actor that sings has a wonderful voice which exudes the requisite passion, irony or tenderness. The music melds jazz and contemporary German dance music. As originally played by a small group, there is an extraordinary small ensemble of seven, each are multi-intrumentalists.
The action segues to the second villain – Jonathan Peachum (played by Tilo Nest). This stalwart of the hypocritical businessman trains beggars to move city-dwellers in pity to give alms. But the beggars must return half their takings to Peachum. Peachum’s daughter Polly (Cynthia Micas) is enraptured with Mack, and sneaks off to ‘marry’ him in a stable. As Macheath (Nico Holonics) is standing up from the pit, the ensemble band serve as the gang members. At several points they are brought into the action, heightening a ‘defamiliarization’. Polly sings a riveting Pirate Jenny.
Suddenly the Chief of Police – ‘Tiger Brown’ (Kathrin Wehlisch) interrupts festivities. Far from chilling the mood, it emerges that Brown and Mackie are former barrack comrades in the pillaging British army in India. Now Brown serves as Mackie’s protector from the law. The rollicking “Kanonen-Song” (“Cannon Song”) is lifted almost straight from Rudyard Kipling.
But when Polly tells her parents she is ‘married’ to Macheath, they vow to get him arrested. Defiantly, Polly tells them that Brown is Mackie’s friend and protector. But this gives them a path. Peachum’s organised power in his army beggars threatens Brown with civic disruption. Macheath flees, handing his gang over to Polly.
But he cannot resist seeing one of his lovers Jenny (Bettina Hoppe) at a brothel. They sing the “Zuhälterballade” (“Pimp’s Ballad”). Yet Mrs Peachum (Constanza Becker) understands Mackie’s weaknesses and sings “Die Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit” (“Ballad of sexual dependency”). She has knowingly bribed Jenny to betray him to the cops. Brown jails Macheath, as the latter intones the “Ballade vom angenehmen Leben” (“Ballad of the Pleasant Life”). Here Macheath excoriates the poor but virtuous life (“They tell you that the best in life is mental/Just starve yourself and do a lot of reading/Up in some garret where the rats are breeding/Should you survive, it’s purely accidental/If that’s your pleasure, go on, live that way…”).
Such reality – or at least a cynical reality – is reprised by Peachum in a later song, here as sang here by Brecht himself – Das Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit des menschlichen Strebens – ‘The Song of Inadequacy’. But perhaps the most searing indictment of capitalist base and super-structure comes when Macheath sings on “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” in “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” – “First comes the feeding and then comes the morals” – sung here by Franz Josef Degenhardt.
Macheath demands more applause from the audience as he praises his own philosophy tossing glitter around. This is funny in the production, and reminds us of a more than a passing resemblance to the character of Brecht himself. Even a brief perusal of the standard biography should conclude this (Steven Parker, “Bertolt Brecht – A Literary Life”: London 2014).
Yet another lover, Lucy Brown (Tiger’s daughter Laura Balzer), and Polly appear at the jail, simultaneously igniting a furious “Eifersuchtsduett” (“Jealousy Duet”). Lucy achieves marvellous heights of ridiculous physical comedy, spitting and spinning. Then she helps Macheath escape. Peachum forces Brown to capture him otherwise his beggar army will disrupt Queen Victoria’s Coronation.
Jenny demands her money for betraying Macheath, revealing that Macheath is now at another lover’s Suky Tawdry. Back to jail for Macheath. Sentenced to execution, his gang refuse him cash to effect bribes. He is strung up dangling on stage. At the eleventh hour Peachum proclaims that this is not real life, and therefore a messenger on horseback will arrive (“Walk to Gallows”) with mercy. As Macheath is released from the gallows having become a landed aristocrat by grace of the Queen, a neon sign blares out “Love Me” and he dresses up in a snappy suit.
The show ends with a plea from the same be-curtained ‘Moon’ that began the performance. Now Josefin Platt softly sings that wrongdoing should not be punished too harshly, as life is harsh enough: “Some people are in the dark, and some are in the light/ you can see those in the light, you’ll never see the ones in the dark.”
On this sad moralistic note, a great entertainment ends an amazing production. Go to see it, but contrary to an often heard Left mythology, it is hardly ‘revolutionary’. The work praises individualism and small-beer rebelliousness, and cannot be thought to ignite revolution. In many ways the work glorifies the lumpenproletariat and the petit bourgeoisie. For me, none of that detracts from the songs, the fulcrum of this work. These blend words and music in an amazing way. Note that at least 3 of the songs were initially unattributed from Francois Villon (1431-1463), and one very closely resembled Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) barrack room songs.
Nonetheless most of the songs’ libretti were by Brecht, though working with Hauptmann. And personally for me, it is Brecht’s poetry that comes closest to a revolutionary literary spirit. Such as “A worker reads history”, or “The Carpet Weavers of Kuyan-Bulak Honour Lenin”. Brecht himself wrote to the novelist Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) that “The trouble is that my poetry is the most telling argument against my plays. The reader heaves a sigh of relief and says my father should have brought me up to be a poet and not a dramatist.” (Stephen Parker Ibid, p.230)
He also remarked that his poems were more of a subjective character while his plays were of an ‘objective’ character. What did he mean, and how does this work fit into Brecht’s dramatic theories? Such questions bring into view the ‘Entfremdung’ theory.
Entfremdung or defamiliarization
Brecht first wrote about this in 1936 in “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting”, describing it as:
performing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious.
(John Willett, ed & Trans.; Brecht on Theatre, (New York; 1964; p.91)
His dramatic theory evolved as he set himself against the predominant structure derived from Aristotle (384-322 BC). Namely, that the audience should be convinced that events on the stage were real. In contrast Brecht argued that:
“The essence of his theory of drama.. is [to] avoid the Aristotelian premise that the audience should be made to believe that what they are witnessing is happening here and now… if the audience really felt that the emotions of heroes of the past – Oedipous, Lear or Hamlet – could equally have been their own reactions, then the Marxist idea that human nature is not constant but a result of changing historical conditions would automatically be invalidated… Hence [his] “epic” (narrative, nondramatic) theatre is based on detachment, on the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), achieved through a number of devices that remind the spectator that he is being presented with a demonstration of human behaviour in scientific spirit rather than with an illusion of reality, in short, that the theatre is only a theatre and not the world itself.”
Bertolt Brecht, Encyclopedia Brittanica
There has been since the 1930s much debate on the left as to whether Brecht’s theories, or their translation into plays were successful in the goals to convince audiences of socialism. It has been challenged by Marxist-Leninists on the sound (in my opinion) grounds that this undercuts the materialist, realist understanding of events. W.B. Bland has argued this convincingly. Bland traces Brecht’s evolving views of the stage, but retaining always an anti-realist approach:
Brecht’s concept of the drama continued to change throughout his life. But there was one consistent feature. Although Brecht always presented himself as a “rebel”, his anti-realist philosophy of the theatre was in accordance with norms of society in that he developed the thesis that ‘Naturalism is a superficial realism’.
He tried to present this as being necessary since “Life must be observed through a missing fourth wall”. The meaning of this is made clear as follows:
“It is of course necessary to drop the assumption that there is a fourth wall cutting the audience off from the stage and the consequent illusion that the stage action is taking place in reality and without an audience”.
(Bertolt Brecht: ‘Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which produces an Alienation Effect’ (1940), p. 136).
The goal of all this was to destroy illusion of reality.
By 1948, he had changed his views and rather than seeing the stage as a ‘lecture hall’ he now asked artists to:
“Let us treat the theatre as a place of entertainment”.
(Brecht: ‘Kleines Organum fuer das Theater’, in ‘Versuche 12;’, p. 109). From W.B.Bland.
Other Marxists including Steve Giles, point out that:
“The years from 1926 to 1932 constitute one of the most productive and problematic phases in Brecht’s career. .. It occupies a central position in this phase in Brecht’s career, a phase of particular importance in Brecht’s shift to Marxism. Accordingly, The Threepenny Opera has tended to be seen as a transitional work, not only in terms of Brecht’s politics, but also as regards his developing theory and practice of epic theatre.”
Moreover that Brecht’s re-writing of the original staged production in 1931 did attempt to place a “Marxist gloss to a work whose original politics were rather more vague”; while also
“rendering more explicit the text’s critique of capitalist society.”
To conclude
This production of a key work of Brecht, Weill and Haputmann is riveting, hilarious and very entertaining, while being thought-provoking. It will not bring the revolution. But a revolutionary in Berlin should make the investment to see it.
