Ruth Mackenzie - Robert Lepage and Barrie Kosky reimagine Stravinsky's The Nightingale and Brecht/Weill's The Threepenny Opera

A wealth of radical mavericks spans the centuries in this year’s Adelaide Festival opera programme. On the one hand, Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale is reinvigorated in a new production by Canadian auteur Robert Lepage. On the other, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera is brought to vigorous new life by former Adelaide Festival director Barrie Kosky.

 Just as Stravinsky, Weill and Brecht broke moulds and pushed boundaries in their respective eras, Lepage and Kosky have produced a succession of major works that have applied their own respective contemporary visions onto productions drawn from the classical canon.

 

Lepage’s take on The Nightingale – first presented by Stravinsky in 1913 -  is an international co-production between his own Ex Machina company with Opéra national de Lyon, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Canadian Opera Company and Dutch National Opera. In tune with this internationalist approach, Lepage is working with Argentinean conductor Alejo Pérez, American puppet designer Michael Curry, and Canadian set designer Carl Fillion. A cast of seventeen international singers, puppeteers and acrobats from all over the world who will join South Australia’s Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and State Opera South Australia for the show. 

 

Kosky’s German production, meanwhile, sees him working with the Berliner Ensemble, the company co-founded by Brecht in 1949 with his actress wife Helene Weigel in the then East Berlin. The company eventually came to take up residence in Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm, where The Threepenny Opera - his and Weill’s own reworking of John Gay’s nineteenth century romp, The Beggar’s Opera, had premiered in 1928

 

For incoming festival director Ruth Mackenzie, both productions are key markers of her first programme. The fact that both productions cut through the sacred cow status of the original works to reinvigorate them while remaining true to their source was part of the appeal.

 

“It was difficult for us to know whether to call Barrie’s production an opera or a theatre’ piece,’ Mackenzie says of the festival’s attempt to define the indefinable, “but the truth is, in Barrie’s hands, it is both, as well as being an anti-opera, which is what Brecht and Weill believed. It’s technically brilliant - Barry always is -  theatrically and musically brilliant, sexy, funny, political.” 

 

As for The Nightingale, in Mackenzie’s view itis “one of Robert Lepage’s best productions, ever. He’s done a marvellous job, and his production makes this the ideal opera for anyone who doesn’t normally think that opera is for them. it is a joyous, delightful, magical theatrical and musical experience. Of course, for those who do love opera, it’s Igor Stravinsky’s first, and it’s rarely performed. You won’t see a better production in your life.” 

 

The Nightingale and Other Fables, Adelaide Festival Centre, 1 and 5 March, 7.30pm, 3 March, 5.30pm, 6 March, 6pm. The Threepenny Opera, Her Majesty’s Theatre, 6-8 March, 7pm; 9 March, 2pm; 10 March, 4pm.

The List Adelaide Summer Festivals Magazine, January 2024

 

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