Sarah Aronson

Brecht, Three Penny Opera

 

Bertolt Brecht’s work, The Three Penny Opera, presents what is perhaps a thinly disguised satire of Weimar Germany.  The play does not take place in Germany at all but rather in the city of London, one of the largest and fully industrialized/capitalist cities in Europe during the Victorian era.  The plot is adapted from John GayÂ’s BeggarÂ’s Opera.  For the most part, the characters of this play are criminals and degenerates, and those who occupy more legitimate posts in LondonÂ’s society are equally unscrupulous and hypocritical. 

 

During the first two acts, the audience learns of Jonathan Jeremiah Peacham’s outfitting shop for beggars, The Beggar’s Friend Ltd.  Employing the discourse of Christianity, Peachum directs a monopolistic ring of organized crime, requiring “[a]ny man who intends to practise the craft of begging in any one of them [London’s fourteen districts] needs a licence from Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum & Co.  Why, anybody could come along—a prey to his baser instincts” (Brecht, 7).  Criminal rival, bandit Mac the Knife, sweeps Peachum’s daughter, Polly, off of her feet, only to abandon her when he must go into hiding in order to avoid arrest at the request of her father.  While Mac is in jail, Polly learns of his two timing nature and escapes by the hand of his other impregnated wife, Lucy. 

 

The Three Penny Opera unfolds in dramatized fantasy-like universe.  The themes of the play and the types of behavior in which the characters engage are realistic, but the theater does not function as a reflection of “real life.”  Rather, it is an exaggerated and caricaturized version which presents a new type of social critique that sharply diverges from older traditions of realism.  This candid fictionality prevents the audience from identifying with characters and may even go further, in effect, actually alienating the audience from the events on stage.  Furthermore, as serious as these social critiques may be, it is possible to ignore humor in The Three Penny Opera.

 

The play’s focus is obviously the life of the poor, yet their lives do not seem to elicit sympathy from the audience.  Without a sentimentalized or romanticized portrayal, the play reflects the distorted life of the poor in a society that only cares about money.  Capitalist values not only affect the haves but in this case, the have-nots.  Profit remains a top (and perhaps the only) priority.  This idea is keenly expressed in the “Second Threepenny Finale, What Keeps Mankind Alive?” as Mac and Low-Dive Jenny sing “Food is the first thing.  Morals follow on…What keeps man alive?  The fact that millions Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed…Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts” (Brecht, 55).  Brecht appears less concerned with how the characters arrived in the socially undesirable positions in which they find themselves and more concerned with what they make of these positions.  On one level the play may be a call for these individuals to take responsibility for the actions.  On another, the play is a call to the bourgeois audience watching the play to take action, to make these individuals feel responsible for the circumstances that have produced an amoral underclass. 

 

The Three Penny Opera not only critiques a particular time and place (i.e. Weimar Germany) but also seems to present some more universal messages.  In the “First Three-Penny Finale Concerning the Insecurity of the Human Condition,” Polly and Mrs. Peachum declare “The world is poor and man’s a shit” (Brecht, 34).  The human proclivity to hypocrisy, self-interest, and most simply put, evil, is depicted most-straightforwardly without much consideration for context of the plight of the poor.  Offer of the law, Tiger Brown, exemplifies this hypocrisy most clearly as he feels an allegiance to Mac, London’s most notorious criminal.  Peachum is horrified by his daughter Polly’s choice in marriage, convinced of his own moral superiority to his number one criminal rival.  Religion is also fertile ground for critique in the play in a world where religion no longer provides complete, satisfactory answers to the questions of existence.  As Peachum argues in the play’s opening, humankind has become desensitized to the messages of Christianity, resulting in their dismissal or appropriation of them by other entities.

 

Brecht’s indictment of humankind is scathing, although he empowers the bourgeois themselves to change things.  Despite the play’s Marxist undertones, it was directed to what must have been a solidly bourgeois audience frequenting the theaters of Europe.  While The Three Penny Opera fails to be truly revolutionary in this sense, it did radically change the direction and purpose of theater and offers a critical analysis of a contemporary in a satirical and ultra-dramatic fashion. 

 

Questions:

 

How can we interpret Brecht’s treatment of the poor?  Is he too critical or insensitive to the social factors that led them to their position?  Is this a blame-the-victim scenario?

 

Who is Brecht’s audience?  Is this a call for social action or is it just art?

 

How is bourgeois society implicated in this play?  Despite their absence from the play, can we still see their values at work?

 

Does this play have any resonance in today’s world?  Do the messages it offers seem anachronistic?