Bertolt Brecht | The Threepenny Opera
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
1917-8
Enrols as medical student at Munich University;
conscripted into German army as medical orderly. Writes first
play, Baal.
1922-33 Writes such important early works as Man equals Man
(1925) and The Threepenny Opera (1928). Studies Marxism in the
early ’30s.
1933Nazi’s seize power in Germany. Brecht flees the country,
eventually settling in Denmark.
1933-47 In exile, writes the plays for which he’s best known:
The Life of Gaileo (1938), Mother Courage and her Children (1939),
The Good Person of Szechwan (1941), The Resistable Rise of Arturo
Ui (1941), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944).
1948-9
Returns to Germany (the DDR) and establishes the Berliner Ensemble.
1953-4
Mourns the death of Stalin in 1953; awarded and accepts the Stalin Peace Prize the
following year.
Brecht’s collaborators
Elisabeth Hauptmann: typed his manuscripts; helped him to write his plays before 1933.
Translated Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera for Brecht.
Margarete Steffin: worked with Brecht on the mss of most of his finest works.
Helene Weigel: Brecht’s second wife; the original Mother Courage; ran the Berliner Ensemble
after Brecht’s death.
Kurt Weill: a composer who worked with Brecht from 1927-33; wrote the music for The
Threepenny Opera.
Caspar Neher: celebrated stage designer. Produced the set for The Threepenny Opera.
Brecht’s epic theatre: an overview
TWO NOTES OF CAUTION!
1.Brecht is a notoriously difficult theorist to follow. His ideas developed and changed
significantly over the course of his life and his various pronouncements often seem to
contradict one another.
1.Brecht’s turn to Marxism largely postdates his writing of The Threepenny Opera. Some of his
later statements about the play might be understood as trying to give it, post hoc, a more
rigorously Marxist message and structure to the play.
EPIC THEATRE?
For Brecht, “epic” theatre was the opposite of “dramatic” theatre.
DRAMATIC: Brecht identified this with Aristotle’s emphasis on climatic structure, noble
characters, fatalism, and catharsis. Naturalism (think Ibsen) and expressionism (think
Strindberg).
EPIC: Brecht looked back to Homer and his representation of history for a vision of a theatre
that engaged with larger social, political, and historical realities.
Brecht’s epic theatre: an overview
EPIC THEATRE
plot
Narrative
implicates the spectator in a stage situation
turns the spectator into an observer
wears down his capacity for action (the world as it
is)
provides the audience with sensations
arouses his capacity for action (the world as it is
becoming)
forces the audience to take decisions
communicates experiences to the spectators
the spectator is involved in something
communicates insights/presents a picture of the
world
spectator is made to face something
suggestion
argument
instinctive feelings are preserved
the spectator is in the thick of it, shares the
experience
the human being is taken for granted
brought to the point of recognition
the spectator stands outside, studies
he is unalterable
eyes on the finish
he is alterable and able to alter
eyes on the course
growth
montage
linear development
man as a fixed point
thought determines being
feeling
In curves
man as a process
social being determines thought
reason
the human being is the object of the inquiry
(Brecht on Theatre, 37)
DRAMATIC THEATRE
Brecht’s epic theatre: key concepts
GESTUS
•The most difficult of all Brechtian words.
•A term coined by Brecht which combines the senses of ‘gesture’ and ‘gist’.
•The Gestus materializes the social attitudes and relationships of the characters.
•Gestus is not only about movement; language, music, even an entire scene, can sometimes be
said to be gestic.
“Gest is not supposed to mean gesticulation: it is not a matter of explanatory or emphatic
movements of the hands, but overall attitudes.” (BoT, 104)
VERFREMDUNGSEFFEKT
•A tricky word to translate. Variously translated as the “alienation effect” and “the
estrangement effect”. Often abbreviated to “the V-effeft”.
•The conscious attempt to prevent the reader from identifying with, or empathizing with, or
taking for granted what’s happening on stage.
•Not just about preventing empathy but also about denaturalizing – making strange – what is
familiar to the audience as a means of exposing the ideological underpinnings of bourgeois
capitalism.
•First described by Brecht in his essay “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” (1936).
Key influences on the development of epic theatre
ERWIN PISCATOR AND AGITPROP
If Brecht was one key personality in the development of epic theatre, then the German director
Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) was the other.
Agitprop = agitation and propaganda. Partisan political theatre.
Picscator’s agitprop productions made use of bold but simple narratives, documentary
material (posters, projections etc.), narration, song, cartoon-like stereotypes. Piscator’s The
Political Theatre (1929) outlined his theory of epic theatre.
Differences from Brecht: where Brecht moved increasingly towards parable as a means of
exposing the inner workings of capitalism, Piscator always took the grand view.
“Where agit-prop theatre’s task was to stimulate immediate action (e.g. a strike against a
wage-cut) and was liable to be overtaken in the political situation, Die Mutter [Brecht’s 1932
play] was meant to go further and teach the tactics of the class war … play and production
showed real people together and a process of development, a genuine story running through
the play, such as the agit-prop theatre normally lacks.” (BoT, 62)
Brecht sought a theatre that was dialectical rather than didactic.
Key influences on the development of epic theatre
GREEK TRAGEDY
Brecht adapted Sophocles’s Antigone in 1948.
“The Antigone story … unrolls the whole chain of incidents objectively … Greek dramaturgy
uses certain forms of alienation, notably interventions of the chorus…” (Brecht on Theatre, 210)
ENGLISH ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN DRAMA
Brecht directed Marlowe’s Edward II (1924), and adapted Duchess of Malfi (1946) and
Coriolanus (1951)
“Take the element of conflict in Elizabethan plays, complex shifting, largely impersonal, never
soluble, and then see what has been made of it today … Compare the part played by empathy
then and now. What a contradictory, complicated and intermittent operation it was in
Shakespeare’s theatre!” (BoT, 161)
Brecht was also influenced by Japanese theatre, cabaret, the fairground, music hall
entertainment, and silent films (of Charlie Chaplin esp.).
Key influences on the development of epic theatre
MARX AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
Brecht began studying the works of Karl Marx in 1926 and in
1932 received instruction in Marxism by his friend Karl Korsch, a
Marxist theoretician. Marxism gave Brecht’s ideas – and his
critique of capitalism – new theoretical force and precision.
Dialectical Materialism
•The philosophical spine of Marxism and its understanding of
history.
•United materialism, the philosophical belief that the universe
is composed only of matter –a philosophy that embraces
nature and science…
•With the Hegelian notion of dialectic: the historical force that
drives events (and thought) onwards. This process is one of
overcoming the contradiction between thesis and antithesis
that inheres in each historical epoch, by means of synthesis.
The synthesis in turn becomes contradicted and the process
repeats itself – until final perfection is reached.
•Where, for Hegel, the dialectic was spiritual or logical, for
Marx it was properly material.
Key influences on the development of epic theatre
DIALECTICAL THEATRE
Brecht sometimes called epic theatre, “dialectical theatre” (and late on entirely abandoned the
former for the later).
Epic theatre might be thought of as dialectical in two ways:
1. It pits two forces, ideas etc. against one another. Not only its ways of understanding and
presenting society but also its very structure is dialectical.
“The new school of play-writing must systematically see to it that its form includes
‘experiment’ … it needs equilibrium and has a tension which governs its components and
‘loads’ them against each other.” (BoT, 210)
2. It seeks to engage the audience dialectically. Rather than preaching to them – forcing them
to swallow a particular message (agitprop) – dialectical theatre presents contradictions that
spectators, rather than the drama itself, must confront and overcome.
Techniques of epic theatre
No attempt to conceal the illusion of theatre
•Curtains should not hide scene changes; lights and other technological apparatus should be
exposed.
Use of history
•Setting a play in the past (such nineteenth-century London) makes the situations remote from
the audience.
Use of the latest stage technology
•Screens, projectors, revolving stages (most famously used in Mother Courage) enable the
theatre to present a dynamic – and scientific – theatre.
Episodic structure
•A lesson borrowed especially from Elizabethan theatre. Abrupt shifts not linear progression
(think of the tight structure of Hedda Gabler).
•Influenced by the montage technique developed by pioneer filmmakers such as Sergei
Eisenstein.
•This episodic structure is emphasized by…
Techniques of epic theatre
Titles and screens
• At the beginning of each scene, a placard or projection offers spectators a summary of
what is to be shown. There are rarely neutral, offering the audience an attitude as much as
a synopsis.
Before the Coronation bells had died away, Mack the Knife was sitting with the whores of
Turnbridge! The whores betray him. It is Thursday evening. (Threepenny Opera, 2.v)
“The screens on which the titles of each
scene are projected are a primitive attempt
at literalizing the theatre … As he reads the
projections on the screen the spectator
adopt an attitude of smoking-and-watching”
(BoT, 43-4)
Set for the 1928 production of The Threepenny
Opera, showing the curtain and screens.
Techniques of epic theatre
Music
http://youtu.be/Ec0clERjQ5A?t=6s
Techniques of epic theatre
Music
•Music used to disrupt or juxtapose other elements of the performance.
“When an actor sings he undergoes a change of function. Nothing is more revolting than when
the actor pretends not to notice that he has left the plain of speech and started to sing … The
actor must not only sing but show a man singing … As for melody, he must not blindly follow it:
there is a kind of speaking-against-the-music which can have strong effects.” (Threepenny
Opera, 86-7)
The music for The Threepenny Opera was composed by Kurt Weill. He created a score that
mixed modernist and contemporary popular idioms, particular jazz and ragtime.
•Deliberate anachronism between the setting of the play (nineteenth century) and the music
(emphatically twentieth century).
As Weill wrote:
“I had before me a realistic plot, and this forced me to make music work against it if I was to
prevent it from making a realistic impact.” (Threepenny Opera, 90)
Songs always come with lighting/scenic change: “Song lighting; golden glow. The organ is lit
up. Three lamps lowered on a pole, and the sign says…”
John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728)
•
Purports to have been written by a beggar
(hence the title), who introduces the play at
the start.
•
Gay stages the criminal underworld –
whores, thieves, highwayman, pickpockets,
informants and so on – in the gin-soaked
streets and taverns of 18th-century London.
•
Invented the new genre of the ballad opera:
spoken dialogue interspersed with songs set
to popular tunes and folk songs.
•Satirized the vogue in London for Italian opera (introduced by Handel).
•Satirized Robert Walpole, the leader of the government (often called the “first prime
minister”) – especially in the character of Peachum, a a receiver of stolen goods and, at same
time, an informer (he impeaches others, hences his name).
The Beggar’s Opera: high life and low life
Throughout The Beggar’s Opera, Gay points to vices and crimes that are as rife in the higher
orders as in the lower – the only difference being that the lower classes face punishment for
those transgressions while the wealthy have enough money to be above the law.
BEGGAR: Through the whole piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in high and
low life, that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vices) the fine gentlemen
imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen. Had the
play remained, as I at first intended, it would have carried a most excellent moral. 'Twould have
shown that the lower sort of people have their vices in a degree as well as the rich: and that
they are punished for them. (3.xvi)
JEMMY TWITCHER: Why are the laws levelled at us? Are we more dishonest than the rest of
mankind? (2.i)
As William Empson wrote: “The main joke is not against the characters of the play at all
…it is against the important people who are like the characters” (Some Version of the
Pastoral, 159).
How does Brecht adapt The Beggar’s Opera?
•
Relocates the play to nineteenth-century.
•
Peachum now in charge of a network of professional beggars, whose outfits and narratives
are carefully designed to elicit sympathy from the rich.
•
Lockit – the corrupt jailor of Gay’s play – becomes Tiger Brown, London’s police chief and
one of Mac’s long-time associates.
•
Macheath the roguish highwayman becomes Mac the Knife, a vicious gang leader and
pimp. Like Gay’s Macheath Gay’s play, Mac can’t resist the allure of a brothel who is
arrested, escapes, and is arrested again; unlike Gay’s Macheath, who is relatively harmless,
Mac the Knife is openly callous and quite untroubled by the violence and murders
perpetrated by his gang.
•
Brecht retains Polly and Lucy (though Lucy now only pretends to be carrying Mac’s child).
•
Brecht also retains, and revises, the ironized happy ending of Gay’s play, where the Player
intervenes to request that the Beggar spare Macheath’s life. In The Threepenny Opera,
Brecht posits this change in classical terms – as a “deus ex machina” – and also overtly
politicizes it (Mac is pardoned by the Queen … think back to Tartuffe).
Bourgeois bandits
In his notes to the play, Brecht stresses the importance of representing the respectability of
the criminal world he depicts.
“The bandit Macheath must be played as a bourgeois phenomenon. The bourgoisie’s
fascination with bandits rests on a misconception: that a bandit is not a bourgeois. This
misconception is the child of another misconception: that a bourgeois is not a bandit.”
(Threepenny Opera, 82-3)
Macheath is the quintessential bourgeois man:
•A businessman.
•A creature of habit.
•A man who claims cultural sophistication: “A rosewood harpsichord along with a renaissance
sofa. That’s unforgiveable.” (1.ii)
•But who will prioritizes economy and utility: “Get the legs sawn off that harpsichord” (1.ii).
•“Between ourselves it’s only a matter of time before I go over into banking altogether. It’s
safer and more profitable.” (2.iv)
“The qualification ‘peaceable’ normally attributed to the bourgeois by our theatre is here
achieved by Macheath’s dislike, as a good businessman, of shedding blood except where
strictly necessary – for the sake of business.” (Threepenny Opera, 83)
Sympathy and theatricality: The Beggar’s Friend Ltd
Peachum states: “my business is arousing human sympathy”
(1.i).
In his notes, Brecht states that the character isn’t “wicked”
but is simply “following the trend of the times” (Threepenny
Opera, 80, 82). Through Peachum, Brecht offers a critique of
the commodification of suffering …
and also of the theatre of sympathy.
Peachum understands that reality of deprivation and misery
doesn’t elicit sympathy – only disgust and shock:
“nobody can make his own suffering sound convincing, my
boy. If you have a bellyache and say so, people will simply be
disgusted” (1.i)
So he specializes in a theatre of fake poverty: suffering is
presented in a moderated, sanitized, and narrativized form.
Using costume and the bible he turns misery into art.
Sympathy offers the conscience an escape route.
Cynicism and the language of class warfare
Characters repeatedly make political statements.
Peachum: … I discovered that the rich on this earth find no difficulty in creating misery,
they can’t bear to see it.” (3.vii)
Macheath: … We lower middle-class artisans who toil with our humble jemmies on small
shopkeepers' cash registers are being swallowed up by big corporations backed by
the banks. What's a jemmy compared with a share certificate? What's breaking into a
bank compared with founding a bank? What's murdering a man compared with
employing a man? Fellow citizens, I hereby take my leave of you. (3.ix)
Important to distinguish between these statements (which are true) and the characters
speaking them (who are being disingenuous).
Macheath isn’t a “lower middle-class artisan” but – as he faces the scaffold – he cynically
mobilizes the language of class to elicit sympathy and outrage from others.
Victimhood is mere rhetoric.
The Threepenny Opera shows how adept are the bourgeoisie at appropriating the
language of class and injustice whenever it serves their needs.
Happy Endings
“The Threepenny Opera is concerned with bourgeois conceptions
not only as content, by representing them, but also through the
manner in which it does so.” (81)
Brecht insisted that the finale – the deus ex machina that spares
Macheath - ought to be play seriously. The satire emerges because
it’s played straight.
“There is no avoiding the sudden appearance of the Royal Mounted
Messenger if the bourgeoisie are to see their own world depicted.”
(87)
The happy ending is a bourgeois form. It offers the fantasy of
resolution – but a fantasy that is robust precisely because it
recognizes itself as fantasy.
Photograph of the 1928
production.
At the close, Peachum states: “In real life the fates [the poor] meet can only be grim. Saviours
on horseback are seldom met with in practice.” (3.ix)
“Injustice should be spared from persecution: | Soon it will freeze to death, for it is cold.”
What does this mean?