Skip to main content

The Threepenny Opera

Festival Theatre

Five stars 


Love and money are everything in Australian maverick Barrie Kosky’s audacious new look at Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s ‘play with songs’, drawn from Elisabeth Hauptmann’s translation of John Gay’s eighteenth century romp, The Beggar’s Opera. Almost a hundred years on from its 1928 premiere, Kosky’s Berliner Ensemble production breathes new life into the show, as he does away with Weimar style trappings and drapes it in an infinitely more modern looking if still decadent gloss.

Set in a poverty strapped world where appearances matter, Kosky opens proceedings in front of a full length silver curtain, where local gang boss Peachum holds court before Macheath and Peachum’s daughter Polly make their entrance. The revolt into style that follows resembles a 1980s Soho-set pop video dreamt up by an unholy alliance of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Julian Temple.

Gabriel Schneider’s Macheath, aka Mack the Knife, is a big suited city boy spiv forever on the make or on the run. Cynthia Micas’ Polly sports a rah-rah skirt, similarly glammed up in her Dinah Ehm designed finery.As Macheath hams it up, at one point showering himself with glitter as he claims his narcissistic moment, there are frequent nods to the band as he and Polly flirt with the audience.

Polly sings Pirate Jenny as a nightclub turn aloft set designer Rebecca Ringst’s maze of podiums that house the ensemble like a team of off-duty go-go dancers. Later, as Polly’s love rival Lucy prepares to knock off her nemesis, the catfight that follows looks like a closing time scrap between besties outside a cocktail bar, with all the tears and tantrums involved before they make up.

All this is raucously soundtracked by musical director Adam Benzwi, who helms a storming eight-piece band who stay true to Weill’s ragged streetwise spirit. Schneider and Micas lead a glorious ensemble, which also includes Amelie Willberg as Lucy, and a keening Bettina Hoppe as Jenny.

Only at the end do the cast appear in more familiar Cabaret style black, as we see how those in power are let off for their crimes with little more than a caution in a world where love is still for sale in this mighty reinvention.


The Herald, August 21st 2023


ends

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Post a Comment
Read more

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more