You can also read this essay in Brave the Castle.
The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht invites discussion about artifice but Barry Kosky’s new production of Brecht’s play in this year’s Adelaide Festival is perfect for it.
Both the original text and Kosky’s incarnation of the play are surrounded by artifice.
You’re probably asking what the hell “artifice” is.
If you Google its meaning, you’ll find the word has a thoroughly disreputable definition. It meaning treads along the lines of sneaky, lying, and conniving, but I’m using it more innocently. My artifice means all the scaffolding erected around a text. This isn’t just the way a director stages the play and stamps it with their own signature. Critics and even the writer themselves can build gazebos grouted with words around a text. For example, the idea that American Psycho is a critique of the American Dream or Humphrey Bogart’s belief that The African Queen was his best film. Artifice is creating anything around the bare bones of the text. It’s adding extra layers over the text. The text is the nude and artifice are the clothes.
What clothes have been slapped on The Threepenny Opera?
First, it was a Lenin’s cap. Brecht was a politically minded artist. He couldn’t let his work sing for itself like Jean Anouilh and surrounded it with his theory of Epic Theatre. This would be a new breed of theatre. The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children, and other works of Epic Theatre would not lull the audience into the dream-like state of sitting, watching, and enjoying a play as if it were real life. Brecht sought to abolish the suspension of disbelief. He staged his plays so that the audience would know they were fake: blatantly artificial sets and actors who acted like they were acting. He staged his plays by the light of the LED moon. The audience would not be allowed to sit back and enjoy the show. They’d remain forever estranged from the play and see the poverty, war, and oppression not as entertainment but as real social problems to be solved outside the theatre. Thus, The Threepenny Opera would save the world.
Did it work?
Hitler came to power a few years after the play was first staged and Brecht fled Germany for the US. So…no.
Brecht tried to turn The Threepenny Opera into a phalanx of the proletariat revolution but the play remains what it really is: a black, comedic cabaret. A murderer and his buddy the chief of police sing a duet together and the head of the beggar’s association complaining that begging is such a difficult profession because there’s only so many lines in the Bible you can quote to prick men’s sympathy. Like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, it’s laughter on the gallows but with more music.
What’s amazing about Kosky’s The Threepenny Opera is that his artifice corrects Brecht’s.
Kosky’s staging is exaggerated. His actors bounce around the stage like jack in the boxes that have grown legs and they’re dressed out in polished tuxedos and sapphire and pearl flapper dresses. Their faces are painted white like silent film stars. They cracking and bend their limbs about with the tin man dexterity of Charlie Chaplin. The artificiality is almost Wes Anderson-level.
Kosky restores The Threepenny Opera to what it is and what Brecht perhaps did not want it to be: a cartoon.
I think Brecht was embarrassed by his own creation. Any Marxist who thinks all art must serve the Revolution would shoot himself for producing this Chaplinesque musical theatre. I think Brecht tried to conceal his shameful child under his sheet of theoretical gobble-gook. But artifice cannot override the text. It can only let the text be what it is even better. Kosky seems to have understood that. He understands The Threepenny Opera better than Brecht himself.
William Barker-Writer and Philosopher 