The Threepenny Opera – Review of 2023 Aix-En-Provence Festival Production

The Aix-en-Provence Festival is in its 75th year and from the 4th to the 24th of July 2023 the gorgeous medieval city in the south of France becomes a mecca of cultural activities from productions of opera, ballet, concerts, and lectures to keep one occupied almost constantly.
The Festival opened on July 4 with a new production of The Threepenny Opera that featured some amazing features. It is done in French in a new translation by Alexandre Pateau in an adaptation by German man of the theater Thomas Ostermeier who also directed the production. L’opéra de quat’sous (four sous) is the French title of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 collaboration. The production is supposed to be faithful to the 1928 text with the addition of a new song, “Pauv’ Madam Peachum” with text by Yvette Guilbert, adapted by Pateau.
In an innovative step, the production uses actors from the Comédie-Française instead of conventional opera singers, and Le balcon, a band of about a dozen musicians playing a variety of instruments under the direction of Maxime Pascal.
Most people know something about The Threepenny Opera. It is a product of the moral and financial morass of the 1920s Weimar Republic Berlin. It is not an opera in the conventional sense, of course, but a parody that attacks private property, capitalism, morality, the bourgeois, the justice system and gives a frightful portrait of life in the slums of London. Crime, corruption, prostitution are the milieu of the work. It is based to some extent on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.
Ostermeier takes an idiosyncratic approach to the opera by producing it partly as a concert version and partly as a fully performed work. This is no doubt a bow to the theory of epic theatre. More about that in a minute. When the performance begins, we see four microphones prominently displayed on the stage. Claina Clavaron sings “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” about the demi-monde of the opera and the anti-hero and preeminent criminal Macheath. otherwise known as Mac the Knife in a style resembling a 1920’s cabaret performance.
From then on, the singing and the dialogue part of the opera will be performed on the microphone or by the characters interacting in the usual way in the theatre. The choice to have actors speak on the microphone rather than interact with the other characters in the scene is the choice of director Ostermeier. This is no doubt an attempt at giving us the then nascent idea of Brecht known as epic theatre, an attempt to treat a play as if it were the recitation of an epic poem rather than an attempt at realistic representation. This is not the place for an essay on epic theater but that idea and Brecht’s dedication to Marxism were not fully developed in 1928.
The Threepenny Opera is, despite its name, a play with songs and therefore has a lot of dialogue between sung numbers. The actors of the Comedie-Francaise spoke it, in various speeds as required by the text. Those without a facility for French dialogue at a certain speed (like moi) could not read the English surtitles with any appreciable speed. But I am sure there were few such types.
After the Ballad we get down to business in what is supposed to be a London slum but there is no indication of that. We start with the disgusting Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (Christian Hecq), a portly gentleman who is the boss of the beggars. He trains and outfits them at their cost and collects 50% of their “earnings.” This may be the original franchise method of doing business. Peachum has a “lovely” wife and partner called Celia (Veronique Vella). They have a pretty daughter called Polly (Marie Oppert) who, horrors, wants to marry some low-life and yes, it is Macheath himself played by a suave Birane Ba.
In the next scene we attend the nuptials of the happy couple with a collection of criminals and Chief of Police Brown (Benjamin Lavernhe). What follows is a scene of slapstick comedy with pies (cake really) thrown at people in a scene reminiscent of The Three Stooges. In true epic theatre style, the actors get down on their knees and clean up the mess made by the cakes when the party is over.
The production continues in the same style with Peachum’s desire to have Macheath arrested and Brown protecting him. They were army buddies after all. There is treachery, bribery, and ballads like the one about sexual obsession, melodrama, the song of Solomon and others.
The sets by Magda Willi are minimal with no hint of London slums. The action takes place during the coronation of a queen, and you can decide a more precise chronology for that but don’t bother. There are video projections by Sebastien Dupouey of geometric figures and black and white photographs and film clips but I could not make head or tails of them. Florence von Gerkan’s costumes were modern but colourful to portray some of the low-lives and hookers of the underworld.
The actors of the Comédie-Française performed with assurance and aplomb from slapstick comedy to more serious scenes and especially comic ones of satire, parody and ridicule of society as well as betrayal, arrest and almost execution of Macheath. In case you forgot the end of the opera, rest at ease. Macheath is pardoned by the newly crowned queen and made a lord.
There are some lyrical songs and the assorted musicians of Pascal’s Le Balcon performed with gusto.
The Threepenny Opera has gained a sure-footed niche in modern culture with some of the songs like The Ballad of Mack the Knife that have gained honourable status. The work has posed difficulties in classification. There is no need. Opera houses and theatres are producing it on a regular basis, and no one should care about classification.
The Threepenny Opera (L’opera de quat’sous) by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill opened on July 4 and will be performed on different dates until July 24, 2023, at the Théâtre de l’Archevêché, Aix-en-Provence, France.

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