The Threepenny Opera (Criticism)

Criticism

Carole Hamilton

Hamilton is an English teacher at Cary Academy, an innovative private school in Cary, North Carolina. In this essay she examines the social constructs of Brecht’s revisions to The Beggar’s Opera and how these revisions played into his political ideals.

When a writer revises and adapts an earlier work, as Bertolt Brecht did with John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), they make revisions that are consistent with a particular aesthetic and ideology. These shifts are part and parcel of the thinking of that writer’s age — an attempt to bring the older work into a contemporary frame and make it meaningful to modern audiences. For example, some late-twentieth-century adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet emphasize the tangled feelings between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude, indicating this age’s acceptance of Freudian Oedipal concepts (sexual attraction between mother and son). Much of the criticism written on The Threepenny Opera has centered on Brecht’s modifications to Gay’s staging: the asides to the audience, the placards announcing events, the songs that belie the often somber action taking place, and the harsh white lighting (elements identified with “epic theater”). However, Brecht also made small but significant changes to the storyline itself and these changes reveal his ideological leanings.

The Beggar’s Opera is about Macheath, a smalltime criminal who marries one of his mistresses while continuing his relationships with other women. Two of the women in his life, his wife, Polly, and lover Lucy, discover each other and vie for the right to claim him. As a way to rid himself of an unprofitable match (he had previously used his daughter’s looks to attract customers to his business), Polly’s father turns Macheath in to the police. After a couple of escapes, Macheath is led to the gallows but receives a last minute reprieve (and considerable rewards) just before he is hung.

Brecht’s secretary (and one of the playwright’s own lovers), Elisabeth Hauptmann, translated Gay’s play into German for Brecht, who then added his inimitable stylistic changes. He transformed it into “epic theater,” but he changed more than the presentation. Gay’s version makes no reference to Jack the Knife, does not include a wedding scene, has no counterpart to Sheriff Jackie Brown, and makes only one tiny reference to the coronation.

Jack the Knife was a nickname for the London serial killer more commonly known as Jack the Ripper. Jack targeted prostitutes and was never caught. The victims were each knifed in a characteristic style, with precise, surgical wounds that led many to suspect the murderer was a doctor or had medical training. The story of Jack the Knife has fascinated and horrified the world. Numerous theories have been proposed to reconcile his grisly methods with a psychological make-up and motive. By shortening Macheath’s name to Mac and adding the words “the knife,” Brecht alludes to the famous serial killer and transforms Gay’s protagonist.

As he is revised by Brecht, Macheath of The Threepenny Opera is already a more ruthless criminal than Gay’s character. Yet the association with Jack the Ripper cloaks him with such an aura of dark menace that Gay’s Macheath pales in comparison. In The Beggar’s Opera, Macheath is a womanizer and a scoundrel but not a murderer. Both characters bribe their prison guard in hopes of escaping and

both go gallantly to the gallows when recaptured. But Brecht’s Macheath is cynical and jaded; murder and death are inescapable elements in his world, and he has learned to make peace with them. In The Threepenny Opera, he and his army buddy (now sheriff), Jackie Brown, sing a ditty about the inevitability of dying on the battlefield, of being chopped into human “tartar” by the enemy. They have seen the worst of war and they have made it into a joke. Mrs. Peachum says of Macheath, “There goes a man who’s won his spurs in battle / The butcher, he. And all the others, cattle.”

Macheath’s attitude towards war has its roots in Brecht’s personal military experience. He had done light duty as an army orderly during part of World War I, and he wrote poetry about the butchery of war. Macheath represents the macabre side of Brecht, who expresses his revulsion with war in grotesque poems that reek of forced machismo. His “The Legend of the Dead Soldier” tells of a corpse that is revived and re-enlisted with gruesome details — such as a canister of incense swinging over the marching cadaver to mask its putrid odor. Brecht’s experience was by no means unique, nor was it extreme — anti-war feelings such as his were pervasive throughout Europe. In his version of The Beggar’s Opera, Brecht has transformed Macheath into a member of the “lost generation” of the postwar years, like Brecht and his peers. The playwright revised the eighteenth-century play to address his era’s prevailing state of mind: numbed and cynical.

When Macheath states his nihilistic case in the “Ballad of Good Living”: “Suffering ennobles, but it can depress / The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” he spoke for a large majority of the European audiences who first viewed the play. This nihilist philosophy justifies licentiousness; Macheath has a “live for today” attitude that closely resembles the decadent cabaret world of Germany in the 1920s. In fact, the lighting, staging, songs, and music all evoke the atmosphere of cabaret. No wonder that Brecht’s early audiences loved the play instead of recognizing it as an admonishment to their bourgeois lifestyle.

Oddly enough, the connections to war and to Jack the Knife are made but not emphasized. In a way, Macheath is a lovable rogue whose vocation sometimes requires that he kill people, a career criminal who wants full credit for such acts as setting the Children’s Hospital on fire. At the end of the play he is reprieved and given a high station, a manor, and a generous pension. He is not unlike those leaders who had actually profited by the war while Germany as a whole was devastated; men who were made heroes for their battleground butchery.

In Brecht’s version of London’s criminal underworld, Macheath marries Polly on stage, whereas Gay had this event occur offstage. The ceremony is made into a travesty of traditional marriage, with its stolen bridal gown, furniture, and food, all taking place in an abandoned stable. The stable element recalls Jesus Christ, who was born in such a humble setting. Macheath, however, tries to transform this setting into a palace, fooling himself that he is surrounded by luxury and becoming irritated by any notice of failure.

None of the furniture matches, and the thugs saw off the legs of a harpsichord to use as a table. The former owners were innocent victims of Macheath’s bungling cohorts, who panicked while robbing the family and killed them. Polly cries, “Those poor people, all for a few sticks of furniture.” In another twisted allusion to the Bible, Brecht has Macheam dragging stolen tables into his sanctuary (Christ overturned tables in the temple). In war-devastated Germany, the sight of valuable household items being sullied by the incompetence of thieves would have been especially distressing.

Jackie Brown is another intriguing revision implemented by Brecht. Brown, in some ways, is even more despicable than Macheath, for he has no redeeming charisma or sexual charm, and he equivocates endlessly over whether or not to turn in his friend Macheath. The shifting tides of German politics and power during these years must have unearthed many such creatures, who were more determined to be on the winning side — insuring their own survival at any cost — than to maintain their integrity. It is Brown who arrives on horseback to announce Macheath’s gifts of a reprieve, elevation to peerage, castle, and a sizable annual pension from the Queen; with his questionable moral fiber, Brown is the instrument of authority and a symbol of a corrupt system.

The final telling variation from the Gay version involves the coronation ceremony. Brecht has Peachum plan a demonstration of “human misery” to coincide with the royal proceedings. John Gay would not have dreamed of having a character in his play put on such a demonstration — the eighteenth century did not have such a phenomenon. But demonstrations staged by political parties were standard fare in twentieth-century Germany. As the labor party factions evolved and disputed, marches and rallies were held to garner support. A group of beggars staging a demonstration would burlesque a common occurrence in postwar Germany, with its continuing contention between socialist democracy (which would become fascism) and communism. Brecht’s comment upon this phenomenon seems to be that the political rallies are no more effective than a parade of “human misery” put on by the miserable themselves.

Brecht has been accused of failing to take a political stand in this play. Robert Brustein in his The Theatre of Revolt found The Threepenny Opera a complex of ambiguities that are never solved. The deus ex machina (“God from the machine”) he finds especially obscure: “With the whole play inverted, and the whole world seen from its underside, even Brecht’s positive affirmations seem to come out backwards.” Yet the final lines literally bespeak an ironic or sarcastic solution: spare injustice from persecution. Brown spares the unjust Macheath from persecution by arriving on horseback to grant him a reprieve, and goes one step further by ennobling and enriching the criminal.

Brecht is saying that Brown’s act, sanctioned by the highest authority in the land (the queen) makes no less sense than to allow any injustice to be tolerated. His ironic comment, along with the theatrical innovations of “epic theater” are designed to provoke the viewer to think; Brecht said that it “arouses his [sic] capacity for action, forces him to make decisions.” Brecht believed that humans adapted to the social settings in which they lived, that “social being determines thought.” Therefore, he adapted Gay’s eighteenth-century play to better portray the social milieu that he was questioning. He set the play in London to provide a comfortable thinking distance, to avoid the politicization of his German audience’s response. He wanted to appeal to his viewers’ rational side (not the empathic response) so that they could revise themselves and their society.

The social elements that Brecht inserts into the play — a ruthless criminal (and possible serial killer), a wedding of thieves, an unjust reprieve — zero in on the very societal flaws he urged his audiences to correct. Brecht explained why he included certain social structures: “The epic theatre is chiefly interested in the attitudes which people adopt towards one another, wherever they are socio-historically significant (typical). It works out scenes where people adopt attitudes of such a sort that the social laws under which they are acting spring into sight.” The Threepenny Opera questions the social laws that were leading Germans, inevitably, to a second World War.

Source: Carole Hamilton for Drama for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• John Gay’s 1728 comic opera, The Beggar’s Opera was Brecht’s source material and offers a good source for comparison. The differences between the two works illustrate the ideologies of the authors who produced them.
• Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and The Trial give an imaginative sense of the futility and nameless anxiety of the pre-World War I years in Europe. For a British perspective, T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” (1922) expresses a sense of spiritual vacuity, with imagery recalling the devastation of World War I.
• The 1972 film Cabaret directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey, and Michael York presents a vivid and compelling picture of the hedonism, decadence, and spiritual longings of post-World War I Germany (circa 1931) in which Hitler began his ascent to power.
• Brecht had a profound influence on the literary artists who succeeded him. His epic theater gave rise to the “theater of the absurd,” which takes his idea of alienation to a new realm. In Samuel Beckett’s 1952 Waiting for Godot (which Brecht had seen and to which he had planned to write another play in reply just before his death) four characters await salvation in the form of the arrival of Godot, who never appears; like Brecht, Beckett raises issues of expectation and fulfillment.
• Jean Genet’s 1956 play The Balcony is another modernist play; it is about a brothel that transforms into a law court, battleground, and a slum, while the characters undergo similar transformations.
• Harold Pinter’s 1957 drama The Birthday Party concerns the disruption of normal daily life by the bizarre and examines the sanctuaries that people build to protect themselves from reality. Pinter’s fragmented and illogical plot causes theatergoers to question their assumptions of “normality.”