CULTURE: Brecht Back On Stage with ‘Threepenny Opera’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Aug 11 2006 (IPS) - Fifty years after his death in East Berlin on Aug. 14, 1956, legendary leftist playwright Bertolt Brecht is being remembered with a rash of exhibitions, panel discussions, films, readings and performances of his famous plays in Germany, confirming his lasting international importance in the theatre world.

At the Berliner Ensemble which Bertolt Brecht founded with his actress wife Helene Weigel in 1949, a special three-week ‘Brecht festival’ is being organised from Aug 12 until Sep 3, to be attended by many German stage, screen and theatre personalities.

The show-biz crowd invited to the launch of the Festival includes Cornelia Froboess, Milva, Katharina Thalbach, Angela Winkler, Wolf Biermann, Christa Wolf, and the veteran Kessler twins, Alice and Ellen.. In addition, ensembles from Tokyo, Budapest, Barcelona, Nice, Zagreb and Florence are flying in to Berlin to give performances of Brecht’s famous works during the festival.

In further Brecht-associated news, the ‘Admiralspalast’, a famous 1920s revue theatre in Berlin reopened on Friday (Aug. ll) after lengthy closure. A lavish new production of the ‘Threepenny Opera’, which catapulted Brecht and lyricist Kurt Weill overnight to world fame when first premiered at the Schiffbauerdamm theatre (now the Berliner Ensemble) in 1928, is being performed there.

Considerable media attention surrounds The Threepenny Opera premiere, as famed Austrian Burg Theatre actor and movie star Klaus Maria Brandauer, 63, spearheads the production, which has Campino, the popular lead singer of German punk band ‘Die Toten Hosen’ playing the role of Mackie Messer.

Hollywood actor Gottfried John plays ‘Mr.Peachum’ and Katrin Sass, of ‘Goodbye Lenin’ movie fame, is ‘Mrs. Peachum’, in the strong all-German cast.

Brandauer, who has a big following in Berlin, told IPS he was thrilled that the Admiralspalast, which is just a stone’s throw from the Berliner Ensemble, has been chosen for the play, which will run throughout the rest of the summer. “Brecht, although born in Augsburg, truly belonged to Germany’s capital as a playwright and writer,” he says, when speaking of his thrill at learning at “close range” more about Brecht’s work.

“Recently I had discussions with Barbara Brecht-Schall, the playwright’s daughter, who lives here in Berlin. We have different opinions on certain aspects of her father’s work, but she has been very kind to me, recognising my right to hold such views,” he says.

Brecht-Schall’s late husband Ekkehard, for years a member of the Berliner Ensemble, played the role of ‘Arturo Ui’ in the Berliner Ensemble production of the ‘The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui’, Brecht’s biting Adolf Hitler parable, a record 500 times until he died last year.

The opening lines of the song from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera hint at the dirty deeds of the gentleman rogue Macheath. As the ballad ends, a woman’s voice rasps, “Look! There goes Mack the Knife!”

But, before he can be fully seen he has slipped into the shadows, leaving behind a shiver of fear, mystery and sexual intrigue.. Critics have claimed that Bertolt Brecht was in his way as elusive as Macheath.

In 1933, on the first day after the Reichstag fire, Brecht quit Germany, and began 16 years of cantankerous exile, during which he waged a constant battle of words against the Nazis, and “changed countries more often than my shoes.”

He sought refuge in Denmark, Russia, Sweden and Finland before finally playing out most of the World War II in the United States. In 1947, summoned before the notorious McCarthy committee hunting down communists, Brecht denied he had ever been a member of the communist party.

A bitter foe of capitalism, he left for Europe shortly afterwards, having received a promise of “a theatre in East Berlin.” Once the Berliner Ensemble was created in 1949, Brecht wrote a programme saying it “would endeavour by its theatrical work to contribute towards the construction of a new Germany, and her national stage.”

Within a few years the Berliner Ensemble had become the most innovative, exciting theatre in Germany – East or West – during the Cold War era. But when Brecht won the Lenin Prize in Moscow in 1955 for “promoting peace and understanding between peoples” he was attacked in the West as a “Commy propagandist”.

In reality, Brecht’s dealings with the East German regime were hardly friendly. When the workers’ uprising was put down with the aid of Soviet tanks on the streets of East Berlin in 1953 he angrily sent a protest note to Walter Ulbricht, the dour East German leader.

However, having decided to live in the east – “the West never offered me a theatre” – he stuck with it. “I don’t sit between stools. I sit on one stool and that is in the east,” he once snapped.

Claus Peymann, 69, the current Berliner Ensemble director, argues that “Brecht is very much in favour with the public again.” What is at stake is bringing the theatre closer to people. That means more solidarity for weaker members of society, and the un-masking of the mighty, said Peymann.

“Brecht is the only German dramatist of real world significance,” he said. “Everybody knows Schiller and Goethe, and yes their plays get played a lot in Germany. But who plays Goethe in Mexico City or Schiller in Capetown?”

Fifty years after his death, Brecht’s plays are performed in cities as far apart as Buenos Aires and Tokyo, Sydney and Paris, London and Moscow, Berlin and New York – with theatre-goers finding their messages still relevant in today’s globalised world.

Born in Augsburg, the son of a manufacturer, in 1898, Brecht first studied natural science and philosophy before entering the world of theatre. Already at 26 in the mid-1920s, Brecht had fathered three children by three different women.

His first play ‘Baal’ was written in 1918. Thirty-nine others would follow before his death in 1956, at the age of 58. Best known are The Threepenny Opera (1928),’The Life of Galileo’ (1938), ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ (1939), ‘The Good Woman of Setzuan’ (1941) and ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’ (1945).