As London's East End scrubs up for
the coronation, Mr and Mrs Peachum gear up for a
bumper day in the beggary business. Keeping tight
control of the city's underground – and their
daughter’s whereabouts. Contains filthy language
and immoral behaviour. |
|
Cast |
|
Macheath |
Rory Kinnear |
Polly Peachum |
Rosalie Craig |
Mrs Peachum |
Haydn Gwynne |
Mr Peachum |
Nick Holder |
Jenny |
Sharon Small |
Lucy |
Debbie Kurup |
Company |
George Ikediashi Sarah Amankwah Dominic Tighe Jamie Beddard Andrew Buckley Hammed Animashaun Peter de Jersey Toyin Ayedun-Alase Rebecca Brewer Ricky Butt Matt Cross Mark Carroll Conor Neaves Wendy Somerville |
Bertolt Brecht was a committed Marxist who found it agreeable to borrow Charles Laughton’s limousine when he went to Hollywood. There he sold the script for one of his works to MGM, that arch purveyor of capitalist entertainment, for $50,000. Ruth Berlau, one of his poor, downtrodden mistresses, had actually written part of that script, and was entitled to 20% of the money, but he never told her about it and kept it all for himself. She was stony broke at the time, and pregnant with his child. A typical leftie all round, really. Hate him or ignore him, you can’t love him.
In 1928, he gave the world The Threepenny Opera, with music by Kurt Weill, an update of John Gay’s much more likeable The Beggar’s Opera. A dark tale of the criminal underworld and the psychopathic villain Macheath, it was supposed to be a satire on the violence and corruption of Weimar Germany. Now the National Theatre, under the wobbly artistic direction of Rufus Norris, has revived it. Reworked by Simon Stephens, it’s set in 1950s London, we are told, although I suspect it’s also supposed to be a portrayal of the violence and corruption of Mr Cameron’s cruel and unequal austerity Britain, so uncomfortably like Weimar Germany. (That was sarcasm, by the way.)
The 1950s setting promises much. The dirty old town is scrubbing up for the Queen’s coronation: “The thieves are on the make, the whores on the pull, the police cutting deals to keep it all out of sight.” So one of the biggest disappointments of the evening is an almost complete absence of any sense of time and place. It never looks or feels remotely like 1950s London, just like the vast cavern of the Olivier theatre, which no doubt is all very Brechtian, but also very boring. Vicki Mortimer has designed a gloomy austerity set to match the tone, with a stepladder and paper walls.
Haydn Gwynne, as Mrs Peachum, climbs up the stepladder at one point in a comical way, with her stalky flamingo legs careening in all directions, as if she has been drawn by Quentin Blake, showing off a pair of black stockings and possibly some Lycra cycling shorts. Other actors come crashing through the paper walls now and again, instead of just entering stage left. Perhaps this ropy old set is a nod to the fact that the National is struggling to get by on the austere £17.6m it gets from Arts Council England each year.
There’s also a disappointing performance from Rory Kinnear, one of our finest comic actors. He can do serious menace, too, as his acclaimed Iago showed. But here, as the arch villain Macheath, “Mack the Knife”, he just settles into a flat, glassy-eyed menace at the start and stays that way throughout. He certainly doesn’t exude sufficient sexual charisma to explain why all the women should fall for him, and, indeed, some of the men.
Yes, we have included here a box-ticking gay subplot involving Macheath and the police chief, Tiger Brown. They enjoy a passionate nostalgic clinch at one point. Apparently, they were soldiers together in Kandahar. Now I hate to be pedantic about this, but the last time the British fought in Kandahar was in 1880, during the Second Afghan War — so this would make Macheath and Tiger Brown in their nineties, at least. Perhaps this is supposed to be Brechtian, too. Perhaps anything implausible or dramatically unsuccessful can be labelled “Brechtian”.
The only character you care about in the slightest is Polly Peachum, played by the wonderful Rosalie Craig. There’s a striking performance, too, from Nick Holder as Peachum, the beggar-master. Mr Holder addressed me on social media not long ago, saying “F***off you irrelevant disconnected prick”, but I do not repine. In fact, it shows courage to insult a critic directly, even if his language is unimaginative. He’s certainly one of the better things here, his sadistic Peachum a huge, gloating transvestite wobble-bottom in heavy make-up and a black bob wig, like some horrendous product of three-way congress between Eddie Izzard, Ronnie Kray and Marjorie the Fat Fighter from Little Britain.
Despite such strikingly grotesque
touches, the whole thing remains cold, distant and
uninvolving, just as Brecht wanted, and this new version
adds only an aimless messiness. Fun fact to finish with,
though: did you know that McDonald’s used the Mack
the Knife song for an ad campaign in the 1980s,
with a deeply creepy moon-man singing “Mac tonight”?
Perhaps it didn’t realise the original was about a
psycho knife-slasher. Brecht would smile a wintry smile
at that, surely — before offering to write McDonald’s
some more stuff, for a substantial fee.
Rufus Norris’s production takes
“fake” as its cue and puts showbiz at its centre.
Everything comes as if from a bashed-up pierrot show
or a violently coloured cartoon. The cops are so Keystone
that they almost break into a kneebend chorus.
Entrails of red wool spill out when someone gets
stabbed. As a lascivious (and spectacularly vomiting)
Mrs Peachum, Haydn Gwynne slithers around in scarlet
like a question mark: an Otto Dix creature, who when
it comes to half time yells “INTERVAL!”, Nick Holder
is spectacular as a Tweedledum-shaped Mr Peachum, in
pin-striped suit, princess heels and a cheek-flicking
bob. As Macheath, Rory Kinnear – spiv moustache,
cuff-snapping three-piece suit – is short on magnetic
sharkiness but his implacability sets up a sinister
thrum. He also turns out to have a very pleasing
singing voice.
There are luscious moments. Polly is vivaciously
reinvented by Rosalie Craig as an accountant (specs
and a limp floral frock) who can run Mac’s affairs
very efficiently when he is “away”. Her duelling song
with Debbie Kurup’s Lucy (hot pants, afro) is one of
the high points of the evening. The onstage band is
strong. Yet the overall effect is neither frightening
nor jolting. Simon Stephens’s scabrous adaptation –
Mrs Peachum is a “skanky old witch” – lands some neat
21st-century jibes. Not least when Macheath, reprieved
from the gallows, is promised a knighthood and an
annual income of £50,000. But what is seen on stage
wafts in an indeterminate epoch, contained in
theatrical inverted commas.
Perhaps no production could live up to the brilliant
penetration of Kurt Weill’s score: sardonic,
insouciant, insistent, it is at once utterly personal
and completely declamatory. It has the impersonal
melancholy of a foghorn, and the beat of city life.
Norris’s theatreland production has juice, but ends up
looking less like satire than an accomplished musical.
What does this famous piece of
theatre mean to us today? The distinguished
translator John Willett got it right when he said it
survived less because of its political content than
through its establishment of a new theatrical genre.
That came home to me while watching Rufus Norris’s
grubbily vivacious revival, which doesn’t so much
ignite our social anger as remind us that Bertolt
Brecht and Kurt Weill proved you can create
memorable musical theatre out of exuberant low-life.
Much of the quality of this production rests on
David Shrubsole’s musical direction which, like the
original 1928 Berlin production, uses an eight-piece
band to do full justice to Weill’s plangent,
sawn-off melodies, even if the song Surabaya
Johnny has been imported from Happy End.
Simon Stephens’s adaptation is less faithful and
makes one or two odd choices, such as turning
Peachum from an embodiment of bourgeois criminality
into a louche figure in high heels and a Louise
Brooks wig.
But even if Stephens overplays the sexuality,
suggesting a past liaison between Macheath and the
police chief Tiger Brown, his lyrics make the right
Brechtian points, such as that survival in a corrupt
world requires compromise and that “we can’t have
ethics that we can’t afford”. Norris and his
designer, Vicki Mortimer, also bring out the piece’s
self-conscious theatricality, and pitch the action
somewhere between Otto Dix’s graphically decadent
1920s Berlin and our own world, in which poverty
becomes a mercilessly exploited spectacle.
The temptation is avoided to
turn Macheath, the master criminal undone by his
sexual voracity, into a glamorous villain: instead
Rory Kinnear fulfils Brecht’s injunction that he
should be “a short stocky man of about 40”, while
putting across the songs with rasping clarity. Nick
Holder as the feminised Peachum, Haydn Gwynne as his
lecherous wife and Rosalie Craig and Debbie Kurup as
the embattled rivals for Macheath’s affections all
give sharply defined performances in a production
that finally suggests it is Weill’s score that
really keeps the piece alive today.