Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), and: The Masque of the Red Death (review)

Going to the theatre these days increasingly has become a quest for a sort of divination for me; unhappy with so much of what the professional theatre carelessly throws at us in the United States, I look to the thriving global scene, not just for a satisfying performance experience, but for signs of a theatre to come (or at least to go to). Two productions I witnessed within several days of each other in March in two European capitals quite clearly marked the boundaries of past and (a possible) future. Though widely disparate events, together they seemed to signal a sea change in contemporary theatre. One, The Threepenny Opera, a vaguely pleasing and mostly familiar confection of Marranca’s Theatre of Images, provided an echo of a once-fresh avantgarde that now appears blunted by the comforts of subsidized theatre and artistic hero-worship. The other, The Masque of the Red Death—an upstart entry in the buzzing field of Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre—made its project to erase the boundaries of performance conventions with a youthful energy that verged on hubris. For a viewer, traversing these events amounted to a journey from immanence to experience.

Robert Wilson’s staging of one of the modern theatre’s key texts, the Brecht/Weill The Threepenny Opera, arrived with plenty of anticipation; this was, after all, the eightieth anniversary of the cynical musical about Mac the Knife, presented at the same Theater am Schiffbauerdamm (that now houses the Berliner Ensemble) for only the fourth time since Erich Engel’s legendary original 1928 production. Wilson tends to be undaunted by the demands of history or theatrical precedent, but the decision to let him helm this quintessential Brecht piece was certainly not without its risks; a critical and audience darling with productions of Büchner and Shakespeare, Wilson had previously directed only minor Brecht (The Ocean Flight). The gods of Brechtian correctness are probably nowhere more implacable than in this city, where memory of the ill-fated and critically trounced 2006 production of Threepenny by Klaus-Maria Brandauer still lingered, and so the entire evening, from the first moments on, conveyed a sense of appeasement as if acknowledging, prima facie, that the original Threepenny Opera is a kind of foundational myth of Berlin theatre that is too powerful to compete with, much less overthrow.

The opening ballad—the play’s signature song—came over the speakers like the famous scratchy phonograph recording of Brecht’s own brittle tenor, as figures posed in front of a curtain swirling with circus lights. At the end, Wilson gave a knowing nod in (and to) the direction of Engel’s original by quoting directly its iconic final scene in which Mac poses insolently on the gallows, legs akimbo. In the two-and-a-half-or-so hours in between, a thoroughgoing, almost ceremonial sense of citation and

Christina Drechsler (Polly Peachum) and Stefan Kurt (Macheath) in The Threepenny Opera. Photo: Lesley Leslie-Spinks.

pastiche reigned. Wilson has mined the graphic inventory of German expressionism repeatedly and effectively for his own ends, and much of that was again on display: the grotesque menagerie of whitefaced characters executing the unnatural movements of clockwork figurines or automata with coldly choreographic precision; the stark minimalism of the set, which resolved the various locations of Peachum’s shop, a horse stable-cum-wedding chapel, or a prison into horizontal and vertical parallels marked mostly by white fluorescent tubes; the severe chiaroscuro of the pinpoint illumination before changing expanses of color on the cyclorama; and the idiosyncratic speech patterns and cartoonish sound effects.

Wilson’s ability to produce unmistakable images of austere beauty is undiminished, but the longevity of his career has depended on two elements: the ability to find...