The real theatrical soul of the threepenny Opera on stage in Rome – Daniele Cassandro

“We don’t need an opera here!” Says the cutthroat Macheath, London’s most famous criminal, breaking into the orchestra pit and grabbing a sheet music; he chuckles as he scrunches it up and burns it in a wastepaper basket. It is the day of his wedding with Polly Peachum, the daughter of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, a pimp and beggar and king of begging. And it is one of the many moments ofThreepenny opera of the Berliner Ensemble, on stage until October 15 at the Teatro Argentina in Rome for the Romaeuropa festival, in which the fourth wall is broken down and the audience is asked to question themselves about what is happening.

Australian director Barrie Kosky created the show in 2021 in the Berlin theater where Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had conceived it in 1928. It’s like being called to stage a Wagner opera in Bayreuth, which Kosky has already done brilliantly with his Nuremberg master singers in 2017.

Like Macheath, the director is also keen to let us know that what we are witnessing is not an opera: it is more a farce in music, an anti-bourgeois divertissement that intends to make fun of the aristocratic language of opera and offer us a satire on the distortions of capitalism. Kosky, however, knows that things are more complex: it is not enough to stage theThreepenny opera like a musical, however rough, perhaps settling on listless assonances between European current events and Weimar Germany in which Brecht and Weill conceived their work.

Complex reflection
Kosky, on the contrary, tries to untie theThreepenny opera as much as possible from current events and delves intelligently into its most metateatral aspects. Both Brecht’s libretto and Weill’s music are the result of a complex reflection and a heterogeneous set of influences: on the one hand Weill reinvents the singing game German, a theater that mixes musical numbers and acting, in the form of a modern cabaret, on the other Brecht adapts an old English dramaturgical model to his socialist and anti-bourgeois vision of society.

L’Threepenny opera was born because Brecht’s then partner, Elisabeth Hauptmann, was working on a translation of the Beggar’s opera (Opera del mendicante) by John Gay and set to music by Johann Cristoph Pepusch, an eighteenth-century parody of Italian opera based on popular ballads and dances. The setting in the slums of London and the absence of real arias and real choirs made it a sort of morality play on the injustices and hypocrisies of the traffic and corrupt aristocracy of the time. Brecht took an interest in that work and decided to rearrange it and re-settle it in Victorian London, the prototype of the greedy and ruthless capitalist metropolis.

The noble or bourgeois public of the eighteenth century, including Händel, Porpora and Bononcini, enjoyed being made fun of by a show that parodied the floundering Italian opera using tavern songs, just as the bourgeois public of Weimar Germany found electrifying, at the end of the twenties of the twentieth century, a jazz opera that, with sophisticated musical numbers disguised as songs from music hallstigmatized a capitalism that many mistakenly regarded as dying.

Barrie Kosky is aware of this game of mirrors between whoever looks at and who is being looked at, between who laughs and who is the object of laughter, and decides to weaken the political aspect ofThreepenny opera to enhance its farcical and theatrical aspect. Also adding, with the presence of a character in transvestitepolice chief Tiger Brown here played by Kathrin Wehlisch, a typical element of another genre of British popular entertainment, the pantomime (o panto) which in fact tears laughter, often coarse, with its musical numbers performed by actors and actresses in disguise.

Theatrical dimension accomplished
Kosky’s great work in his Threepenny opera is to restore a complete theatrical (and metatheatrical) dimension to a work that, over the decades, has been weighed down on the one hand by an interpretative hypertrophy of its political aspects, on the other transfigured into a reliable pop artefact (pieces fromThreepenny opera have been taken out of context and sung by anyone, from Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra to the Pet Shop Boys, via Milva, Sting and Cyndi Lauper).

The work of the Berliner Ensemble on the music of Kurt Weill is one of the most remarkable aspects of this production: on the one hand it is extremely philological in its instrumentation and voices, on the other it takes the liberty of interpolating, between sung numbers and recited parts, music incidents obtained from the reworking of some themes of the songs. Happy is also the idea of ​​often recurring the very famous theme of Ballad by Mackie Messer which, at a certain point, we also hear coming out of an old music box.

Barrie Kosky avoids any reference to the now overused iconography of Weimar Germany. How many productions ofThreepenny opera we have seen that they look like Cabaret by Bob Fosse in which every character, not only female, is made up like Liza Minnelli and wears hair a la Louise Brooks? The cinematographic references of this production are more shrewd and discreet. In the comedy parts, especially in the dialogues between the two rivals Polly and Lucy, the touch of Ernst Lubitsch is felt, and in the en travesti interpretation of Tiger Brown, Kathrin Wehlisch recalls Charlie Chaplin and seems to remain in part even when he comes out, trotting, for the applause.

Particularly noteworthy is the interpretation of Nicolo Holonics (Macheath) who manages to be both a human wreck of Rainer Fassbinder and a brilliant, sassy Robbie Williams with a tank top and a slight hint of a beer belly. Jenny, the whore who sells Macheath to the police, is a lyrical and crystalline Bettina Hoppe and Polly an impeccable Cynthia Micas who when she sings Jenny of the pirates it gives body and blood to that spirit of gallows revenge that populists of all ages like so much to velliate.

Constanze Becker is Celia, Polly’s mother, Venus in fur who, naked under a beaver coat that seems to have come out of Claretta Petacci’s wardrobe, sings the Ballad of sexual slavery. Excellent is also Tilo Nest in the role of Peachum, the pimp of the crippled and the miserable, the exploiter of war invalids and beggars who smacks his whip like a circus tamer. Laura Balzer’s Lucy has crackling comic tempos, the caricature of a dazed and hyperkinetic ex Spice girl as extremely charismatic is Josefin Platt in the role of the Soho Moon who looks out from time to time to intone the notes of the Ballad by Mackie Messer.

Although he worked very effectively on the theatrical rendering of Brecht’s work, Kosky does not completely dry out his political intent: if anything he transfigures it and makes it universal. His Threepenny opera it is a reflection on the impossibility of love and solidarity in the bloody jungle of dominant capitalism. When Polly goes to jail to find her husband Macheath sentenced to death she tells him, almost casually: “The money is in a Manchester bank, business is good.” And above all, in the fake happy ending of the opera, in which the news arrives that the killer, thief and pimp Macheath has been pardoned by the queen, the man has already been hanged and dangles, with his neck broken, on the stage.

The grace of the queen, she too the invisible gear of a corrupt system, makes him resurrect and from a gallows pendant transfigures him into a malevolent and blasphemous risen Christ. It is up to the public to decide whether any reference to the resurrection of other hanging criminals is purely coincidental or not.