Read more
One of Bertolt Brecht's best-loved and most performed plays,
The Threepenny Opera was first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble).
Based on the eighteenth-century
The Beggar's Opera by John Gay, the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho.
With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world.
This new edition is published here in John Willett and Ralph Manhein's classic translation with commentary and notes by Anja Hartl.
List of contents
Chronology
Contexts
- Historical, social and cultural
- Political and social climate of the 1920s
- Cultural context: the Roaring '20s
- Significance of the play for Brecht and for political theatre
- 18th century context
- 20th century context
- Britain vs. Germany; London/East London
Genres
- Opera/music/theatre – a new theatrical genre
- Adaptation – John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
- Hybridity: low- and highbrow, emphasis on fun, entertainment in Brechtian theatre
- Satire
Themes
- Who is who? Bourgeois and/or beggar?
- Role of the institutions (police, royal family, state)
- Corruption, money
- Exploitation, human trade, poverty
- Morality, asocial vs. social
- Love and sexuality, prostitution
- Resistance and change
- Which opportunities for change are envisioned by the play?
Characters
Male characters
- Peachum empire
- Macheath
- Tigerbrown
Female characters and sexual politics of the play
- Mrs Peachum
- Polly
- Jenny
Play as performance
- Brechtian principles of theatre-making
> emphasis on dialectical theatre
> theatricality
> actor-audience relationship
> deus-ex-machina ending
- Music
> Kurt Weill’s composition
> Brechtian opera
> The significance of the songs
Academic debate
- Central strands in scholarship (comparative readings, focus on music and operatic genre)
Production history
- German productions (Berliner Ensemble; new production announced for January 2021)
- English productions
- International success (and problems which ensued: misinterpretation, commercialisation, etc.)
- Der Dreigroschenprozess (The Threepenny Trial by Bertolt Brecht)
- Simon Stephens’s recent new version at the National Theatre, UK
- Joachim Lang’s film Mackie Messer – Brechts Dreigroschenfilm
Behind the scenes
Interview with playwright Simon Stephens
Further reading and viewing
THE THREEPENNY OPERA
Additional texts
Notes
About the author
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) is acknowledged as one of the great dramatists whose plays, work with the Berliner Ensemble and critical writings have had a considerable influence on the theatre. His landmark plays include The Threepenny Opera, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
Anja Hartl is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is the author of Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama: Dialectical Theatre Today and editor of the Methuen Drama Student Edition of The Threepenny Opera. Her research focuses on contemporary British theatre, Victorian fiction and adaptation studies. She co-edits the Methuen Drama Agitations Series.John Willett (1917-2002) was the greatest English language authority on Brecht the writer and man of the theatre. The foremost translator and editor of Brecht's drama, poetry, letters, diaries, theatrical essays and fiction, Willett produced a dozen volumes for Methuen Drama on the greatest modern German writer.Ralph Manheim (b. New York, 1907) was an American translator of German and French literature. His translating career began with a translation of Mein Kempf in which Manheim set out to reproduce Hitler's idiosyncratic, often grammatically aberrant style. In collaboration with John Willett, Manheim translated the works of Bertolt Brecht. The Pen/Ralph Manheim Medal for translation, inaugurated in his name, is a major lifetime achievement award in the field of translation. He himself won its predecessor, the PEN translation prize, in 1964. Manheim died in Cambridge in 1992. He was 85.
Summary
One of Bertolt Brecht's best-loved and most performed plays, The Threepenny Opera was first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble).
Based on the eighteenth-century The Beggar's Opera by John Gay, the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho.
With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world.
This new edition is published here in John Willett and Ralph Manhein's classic translation with commentary and notes by Anja Hartl.
