Recently in Performances

ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude

English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.

Love, always: Chanticleer, Live from London … via San Francisco

This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).

Dreams and delusions from Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall

Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.

Treasures of the English Renaissance: Stile Antico, Live from London

Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.

A wonderful Wigmore Hall debut by Elizabeth Llewellyn

Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.

The Sixteen: Music for Reflection, live from Kings Place

For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.

Iestyn Davies and Elizabeth Kenny explore Dowland's directness and darkness at Hatfield House

'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’

Paradise Lost: Tête-à-Tête 2020

‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’

Joyce DiDonato: Met Stars Live in Concert

There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.

‘Where All Roses Go’: Apollo5, Live from London

‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields 're-connect'

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.

Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton join Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO at St Luke's

The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.

Choral Dances: VOCES8, Live from London

With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.

Royal Opera House Gala Concert

Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.

Fading: The Gesualdo Six at Live from London

"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."

Met Stars Live in Concert: Lise Davidsen at the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo

The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.

Precipice: The Grange Festival

Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.

Monteverdi: The Ache of Love - Live from London

There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”

Music for a While: Rowan Pierce and Christopher Glynn at Ryedale Online

“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”

A Musical Reunion at Garsington Opera

The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.

OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »

Performances

(L–R) Peter de Jersey (Tiger Brown) and Rory Kinnear (Macheath)
31 May 2016

The Threepenny Opera, London

‘Mack does bad things.’ The tabloid headline that convinces Rory Kinnear’s surly, sharp-suited Macheath that it might be time to take a short holiday epitomizes the cold, understated menace of Rufus Norris’s production of Simon Stephens’ new adaptation of The Threepenny Opera at the Olivier Theatre.

The Threepenny Opera, London

A review by Claire Seymour

Above: (L–R) Peter de Jersey (Tiger Brown) and Rory Kinnear (Macheath)

 

But, the violence is no veneer and Norris expertly paces the exposure, like a torturer gradually tightening a thumb-screw, peeling away the paper patina to lay bare the darkness at the core.

Vicki Mortimer’s designs tell us that this is a paper-thin world: fragile, bitter and comfortless. The underbelly of both the theatre and the East End are exposed, and iron scaffolding and flimsy tissue flats embody the latter’s extremes. Blood-stained body-bags plunge from the heights, their red fly-ropes reminding us that both murder and the noose are never far away. The bands of beggars are a ghostly troupe of shadows, balaclavas masking their humanity. The stairwells swivel but they lead nowhere; there’s no way out of this underworld. Despite the updating, Mortimer and Norris don’t sweep away the spirit of the 18th-century East End, hungry and haunted. Its starkness is matched by Stephens’ coarse, smut-strewn text which adopts a contemporary vernacular — ‘What a twat!’ spits Peachum — and recalls John Gay’s practice, in The Beggar’s Opera, of superimposing new vulgar texts onto well-known songs: ‘Oh London is a fine town’ became ‘Our Polly is a sad slut!’

Jpeg 3.pngThe Musicians

An early tableau is the closest we get to a hint of ‘relevance’. Labels identifying the causes and victims of poverty are plastered on fragments of stage-machinery: Addiction, Alcohol, Lepers, Abused Children, Lunatics — then, as now. When the roll-call of misery gets to ‘Teenage Runaways’, the cast’s parodic knee-twist prompts a guffaw from the audience, but the succeeding comment that they are ‘all undoubtedly victims of the most horrendous sexual abuse’, quickly stifles it.

Norris doesn’t overdo the Brechtian alienation gimmicks: a few gestures, such as a barked ‘Scene Change’ or ‘Interval’, nod in the direction of ‘epic’. There are some self-knowing shrugs, as when Macheath hustles a saxophonist off the stage, or snarls at us after the interval, ‘So, you came back!’, but they’re not overly intrusive.

A t-shirt slogan — ‘Over’ front, ‘-ture’ back — signals the striking up of the band, who march to the fore-stage while behind a dumb-show parade sums up the action to come. Future victims of Mack’s knife spew rope-entrails and there’s a pantomimesque hyperbole which persists when we meet the rapacious, crooked Peachums. Nick Holder’s Mr Peachum — eyes powdered with dark-rings, lips painted vampire-red, dapper in pin-stripe, pinafore and spats — and Hadyn Gwynne’s scarlet-frocked Mrs Peachum, inebriated and projectile-vomiting, have a touch of Rocky Horror Show about them. But, if initially Peachum seems merely a rotund, mischief-making opportunist, we are swiftly disillusioned: no amount of perfume can hide the stench of this Peachum’s callousness — as the cringe-making snap of Jenny Diver’s wrist later confirms. Holder relishes the vulgarities of Stephens’ lyrics — they’re all crystal-clear — and he’s well-abetted by Gwynne in the comic ribaldry.

Jpeg 5.pngJamie Beddard (Matthias) and Rebecca Brewer (Betty)

Similarly, the clipped brusqueness of Kinnear’s business-like Mackheath — the fine cut of his double-breasted, midnight-blue suit would flatter a banker — eventually slips into a tight snarl, bursting with psychopathic viciousness. This Macheath might arrive in a glowing ring — like an old-time Hollywood legend — fairy-lights twinkling behind, but a knife-silhouette speaks of his ruthlessness and as the repressed violence is released it’s clear we’re watching a psychotic bully at work, one prepared to tyrannise, brutalise, sodomise to get what he wants. The only hint of ‘charm’ comes with ‘Mack the Knife’, delivered with style and appealing vocal warmth, where Kinnear’s enjoyment of Weill’s seductive sway and Stephens’ sharp lyrics almost convinces us that there might be a human heart beneath the hardness, after all.

But, no: Kinnear’s Macheath is a study in gratuitous nastiness. But, he’s not Brecht’s Macheath, who demonstrates pretensions towards bourgeois rites and taste — with his fondness for matrimony and pride in his ability to distinguish Chippendale from Louis Quartorze when his men supply him with stolen furniture. In Brecht’s text, Macheath’s has a reckless bravado and magnetic attractiveness that outweigh any capitalist manifesto. In contrast, Kinnear’s Macheath may get want he wants, but it’s not clear why he wants it — is he just a killing machine whose life has become the knife?

Macheath’s henchmen are a dysfunctional foursome, as emotionally impaired as their overlord. Jamie Beddard, who has cerebral palsy, is cast as Matthius (aka The Shadow): he may have a speech impediment but he spits out Stephens’ expletives to the far reaches of the Olivier with acerbic clarity and corrosiveness. Dominic Tighe conveys the stiff coldness of the ‘Iceman’, while you wouldn’t want to meet Hammed Animashaun’s explosive Jimmy Retail on a dark night.

Polly Peachum’s knee-length brown cardigan is out of place in this existential hinterland, though Rosalie Craig does later don some thigh-high red leather boots under her white floral frock. Craig stands out among the cast for her ability to tap into the emotional resonances of Weill’s music. She dispatches ‘Pirate Jenny’ with steely spite, revealing the strong core beneath Polly’s bespectacled, straight-laced exterior, and she excels in the ‘Jealousy Duet’ with Debbie Kurup’s Harlem-girl Lucy Brown. Kurup’s voice glows as vivaciously as her orange shirt and red hot-pants. It’s clear that neither girl is going to be a winner.

Jpeg 7.png(L‐R) Debbie Kurup (Lucy Brown), Rory Kinnear (Macheath), and Rosalie Craig (Polly Peachum)

Sharon Small is affecting as the drug-addicted Jenny Diver, though she struggles with Weill’s challenging vocal line. Peter de Jersey is a strongly characterised Chief of Police, but I didn’t get the sense that he and Macheath were ‘partners in crime’.

The stage-craft is slick. The sleight-of-hand shifts between scenes and locales are breathless and disorientating; the big musical numbers are tightly choreographed, their juxtaposition with the surrounding text highlighted by Paule Constable’s effective ‘Songlicht. The fight scenes are both vicious and balletic: the unintentional stabbing at the end of Act 1 is perfectly timed and Kinnear captures both Macheath’s shock — a momentary wide-eyed stillness — and defiance as, confident that he will indeed ‘wriggle out of this one’, Macheath is whirled off-stage in a wheel-chair.

This may be a ‘play with music’ but Weill’s music — the songs, ensembles and the instrumental interludes played during the scene changes — is anything but incidental. The ensemble cast may be singing thespians rather than acting singers — and some struggled to convey the dramatic and emotional richness of Weill’s score — but none of Brecht’s and Weill’s original cast, on 31 August 1928 in the small Theater am Schffbauerdamm in Berlin, was a professional opera singer. The occasionally unpolished vocal delivery matches the rough-edged set and they are magnificently supported by David Shrubsole and his musicians, who wander in and out of the action in macabre gothic get-ups. As Mortimer’s sets disembowel the theatre, so Shrubsole’s band turn the opera inside out.

This is a terrific production which I would urge no one to miss. But, reflecting post-performance I found myself more sceptical about what essential ‘messages’ the production was designed to communicate.

Jpeg 11.pngHaydn Gwynne (Mrs Peachum) and Nick Holder (Mr Peachum)

Die Dreigroschenoper was initially conceived as art about art. In Brecht’s text, during his wedding Macheath quips, ‘I’m not asking for an opera’; and, when the knifer is reprieved at the close, Peachum retorts, ‘So at least in opera, one can see how mercy comes before justice’. It may have drawn from diverse worlds — dance band, Lutheran chorale, jazz, popular song — but the work is consistently in dialogue with ‘high’ culture (John Gay, François Villon, Rudyard Kipling, Wagnerian leitmotiv, Stravinsky, Satie, Cocteau, Picasso …). Weill remarked thatDie Dreigroschenoper ‘presented us with an opportunity to make “opera” the subject matter for an evening the theatre’.[1]

But, when Brecht published a revised version of the libretto in 1931, he re-wrote the dialogue to strengthen the political message, and said, in a 1933 interview, that what mattered to him was ‘A critique of society. I had tried to show that the mind-set and emotional life of street robbers is immensely similar to the mind-set and emotional life of respectable citizens.’ Brecht designed his text to reveal the true unacceptable face of capitalism, in which criminals who are similarly bourgeois set the tone for business. It seems ironic that, for all Stephens’ skewering of fat cats, corporate golden handshakes and peers’ expense scandals, a lot of money has been spent at the National Theatre in depicting a world that has none, in order to perform ‘high’ culture, to an essentially middle-class audience.

We remember the words of Brecht’s ‘First Threepenny Finale’, delivered by a cynical Peachum:

Let’s practise goodness; who would disagree?
But sadly on this planet while we’re waiting
The means are meagre and the morals low.
To get one’s record straight would be elating
But our conditions such it can’t be so.

Claire Seymour


Cast and production details:

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera (anew adaptation by Simon Stephens)

The Balladeer/Pastor Kimball — George Ikediashi, Captain Macheath — Rory Kinnear, Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum — Nick Holder, Filch — Sarah Amankwah, Celia Peachum — Haydn Gwynne, Polly Peachum — Rosalie Craig, Robert (AKA The Iceman) — Dominic Tighe, Matthius (AKA The Shadow) — Jamie Beddard, Walter (AKA The Scholar) — Andrew Buckley, Jimmy ‘Retail’ — Hammed Animashaun, Chief Inspector ‘Tiger’ Brown — Peter de Jersey, Jenny Diver — Sharon Small, Vixen — Toyin Ayedun-Alase, Betty — Rebecca Brewer, Ruby — Ricky Butt, Officer Smith — Matt Cross, Lucy Brown — Debbie Kurup, Ensemble — Mark Carroll, Conor Neaves, Wendy Somerville; Director — Rufus Norris, Designer — Vicki Mortimer, Musical Director — David Shrubsole, Choreographer — Imogen Knight, Lighting Designer — Paule Constable, Sound Designer — Paul Arditti, Fight Directors — Rachel Bown Williams and Ruth Cooper (RC-ANNIE Ltd). Olivier Theatre, National Theatre, London, Saturday 28th May 2016.



[1] See Stephen Hinton, Wiell’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (University of California Press, 2012).

Send to a friend

Send a link to this article to a friend with an optional message.

Friend's Email Address: (required)

Your Email Address: (required)

Message (optional):