“Threepenny Opera” in Berlin: And the shark wears tinsel

A whole stage curtain made of tinsel. Is it Christmas already today? With the Berliner Ensemble already after finally, after long, corona-related difficult rehearsal phases, with a half year delay, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera” is shown on the stage of the ornate neo-baroque theater space. It doesn’t exactly invite you to reflect on his aesthetic mechanisms of action, and Barrie Kosky’s staging also transforms Brecht’s epic theater claim into a colorful revue. Although this is a bit more brittle than Kosky is used to. The shrillest thing is a squeaky tea cart with which Kathrin Wehlisch, as Police Chief Brown, pushes the hangman’s meal for Mackie Messer onto the stage. It’s asparagus, and she’s feeding it a little awkwardly. That was a great laugh success, which was perhaps also so violent because the bitter end of the piece was approaching and another explosion of humor was not to be expected.

Mackie Messer, played virtuously by Nico Holonics, who can also sing, is of course saved from the noose in which he is already wriggling by the royal messenger. The staging is always alive, you notice that more and more towards the end, from the excellent actors. Tilo Nest as Peachum and even more Laura Balzer as Lucy in her duo with Cynthia Micas (Polly) bring momentum to the performance, which in parts dawns in the midst of colorful lights and perfect costumes. The fact that the entire stage space has been blocked for a long time with a rack of stairs and pedestals on which the actors do gymnastics gives a more oppressive feeling than an unobstructed view of the epic theater.

Everything here looks historical, well-behaved and timid

One had the impression that Kosky wanted to take the work, which was premiered almost 100 years ago, very seriously again and make the difficult part easy, rewarding the thought required with small entertaining bites. A hundred years later, however, the fact that the light can also become difficult in reverse is a danger that should hardly be underestimated. What was once wild and vulgar, what textual and musical street jargon strained the acceptance limits of the bourgeois audience, is now nice old hat. There are not even F-words.

The problem also affects the music, although there would have been a lot more leeway here to shape it appropriately. However, after the wonderfully weird opening fugato, the conductor Adam Benzwi led the seven-piece band to strictly clean play during the opening shark song, away from the street and into the art world. Moritat comes as an almost lovely song from an innocent white make-up woman’s face that peeks out of the tinsel wall.

It all sounds so familiar and yet a bit strange in the almost unbroken repetition of timid revolutionary gestures that have become historical, this Marxist satirical made by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill on the “Beggars Opera” by John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch from 1728. The music is still flowing Remnants of that squeaky Weimar party sound, but even if you want to believe, as Kosky claims, that Weill was as important to 20th century opera as Wagner was to 19th century opera, this production cannot vouch for it.

Brecht got in his own way because of the quality of his texts

But one can also put this into perspective and, bypassing the most performed operas of the last century, admit that composers like Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Carl Orff, Paul Hindemith, Béla Bartók, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Arnold Schönberg, Ernst Krenek, Franz Schreker, Alexander Zemlinsky , Wolfgang Korngold, Francis Poulenc, Aribert Reimann, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein or Luigi Nono also have a certain importance in the redesign of modern music theater. Then one takes Weill a little of the enormous historical burden of being a Wagner-like innovator of music theater, and instead sees in the “Threepenny Opera” some space for the dramatic, playful, imponderable, subjectivistic that is inherent in this stage work. This time, however, the subtle playfulness was a little neglected, with all the stinky little ones.

Because as academically rigorous as Weill’s music often sounded like that evening – was the ensemble too good? – that is how much its tonal language lives from cheeky historical quotations, the church chorale at the end, for example, or the roughly carved counterpoint at the beginning. There’s irony in there, but not too much. At least not at the level of Jacques Offenbach, for example, who traced the classical opera down to the level of the musical composition in a tiny parodic way. Weill is as clumsy there as Brecht demands in order to carry out epic theater in music as well. Which can never quite succeed. Not even with Brecht, whose lyrical talent always comes through, whose rhymes seduce, if not to sentimentality, at least to empathy. With him too, so to speak, first comes the art-eating, then the aesthetic morality, the thinking about it. But does he really want to have his means reflected coolly while watching, as he claims? Isn’t it more important to him to think about the cynically exposed circumstances that make it impossible for people to be good?

In any case, Kosky obviously doesn’t want it. He wants lively entertainment at almost any price and has a secure feeling when it comes to not overloading such an evening at the theater intellectually. But even if there is hardly any danger of the whole thing falling into dry discourse, Kosky seems to be driven by precisely this fear. Then a spotlight comes in from somewhere and lights up a face, and there’s a little tinsel and then more tinsel. That inspires many – the applause was great, but there were also boos.