Kyle’s Reviews > The Threepenny Opera > Status Update

Brecht has a lot to say about his favourite play, tinkering with it for decades after its Berlin premiere, and at times he can be a bit contradictory about the show’s meaning: firstly, in adapting Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, whether Brecht’s play was for beggars or by beggars. One feels sympathy for the poor actors having to learn new songs, break with stage conventions and still probably get criticized by Brecht.

To bring this timeless play into more modern terms, a career criminal denies any claim to PTSD while his army buddy enables his waywardness. His addiction to the commercial sex industry leads to his downfall while also setting back the MeToo movement as the mistreated women always defend him. Meanwhile his father-in-law positions fake protestors to disrupt national interests. Corporations and banks are behind it all.

Certainly one of the messier plays to radically alter theatre history; hard to imagine what Brecht’s Shakespeare in Love or Bohemian Rhapsody would look like. And yet, for all the ups and down in Brecht’s (and Weill’s) career, this comic opera appears to be the playwright’s perennial favourite, as he constantly refers to it in Brecht on Theatre. Like the prologue “Mack the Knife” it swings.