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.
1933Nazis seize power in Germany. Brecht flees the
country, eventually settling in Denmark.
1933-47 In exile, writes the plays for which hes 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.

Brechts collaborators

Elisabeth Hauptmann: typed his manuscripts; helped him to write his plays
before 1933. Translated Gays The Beggars Opera for Brecht.
Margarete Steffin: worked with Brecht on the mss of most of his finest
works.
Helene Weigel: Brechts second wife; the original Mother Courage; ran the
Berliner Ensemble after Brechts 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.

Brechts 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.Brechts 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 Aristotles 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.

Brechts epic theatre: an overview

he is unalterable
eyes on the finish
growth
linear development
man as a fixed point
thought determines being
feeling

EPIC THEATRE
Narrative
turns the spectator into an observer
arouses his capacity for action (the
world as it is becoming)
forces the audience to take decisions
communicates insights/presents a
picture of the world
spectator is made to face something
argument
brought to the point of recognition
the spectator stands outside, studies
the human being is the object of the
inquiry
he is alterable and able to alter
eyes on the course
montage
In curves
man as a process
social being determines thought
reason

(Brecht on Theatre,
37)

DRAMATIC THEATRE
plot
implicates the spectator in a stage
situation
wears down his capacity for action (the
world as it is)
provides the audience with sensations
communicates experiences to the
spectators
the spectator is involved in something
suggestion
instinctive feelings are preserved
the spectator is in the thick of it, shares
the experience
the human being is taken for granted

Brechts 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 whats 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.
Picscators agitprop productions made use of bold but simple narratives,
documentary material (posters, projections etc.), narration, song, cartoon-like
stereotypes. Piscators 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 theatres 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 [Brechts 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)

Key influences on the development of epic

theatre
GREEK TRAGEDY
Brecht adapted Sophocless 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 Marlowes Edward II (1924), and adapted Duchess of Malf
(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 Shakespeares theatre!
(BoT, 161)
Brecht was also influenced by Japanese theatre, cabaret, the
fairground, music hall entertainment, and silent films (of Charlie

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 Brechts 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

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.

John Gays The Beggars 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 Beggars Opera: high life and low life

Throughout The Beggars 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 Beggars 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 Gays play becomes Tiger Brown, Londons
police chief and one of Macs long-time associates.

Macheath the roguish highwayman becomes Mac the Knife, a vicious gang
leader and pimp. Like Gays Macheath Gays play, Mac cant resist the
allure of a brothel who is arrested, escapes, and is arrested again; unlike
Gays 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 Macs child).

Brecht also retains, and revises, the ironized happy ending of Gays play,
where the Player intervenes to request that the Beggar spare Macheaths
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

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
bourgoisies 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. Thats unforgiveable. (1.ii)
But who will prioritizes economy and utility: Get the legs sawn off that
harpsichord (1.ii).
Between ourselves its only a matter of time before I go over into banking
altogether. Its safer and more profitable. (2.iv)
The qualification peaceable normally attributed to the bourgeois by our
theatre is here achieved by Macheaths dislike, as a good businessman, of
shedding blood except where strictly necessary for the sake of business.
(Threepenny Opera, 83)

Sympathy and theatricality: The Beggars

Friend Ltd
Peachum states: my business is arousing human
sympathy (1.i).
In his notes, Brecht states that the character isnt
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 doesnt 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.

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 cant 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 isnt 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 its 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?