The threepenny opera

11.02 - with English surtitles.

Ersan Mondtag dives deep into the horror under the skin of this snappy.

What a story, so beguiling and shrill – the milieu of gangsters, that exotic thrill of crime in the moonlight of Soho! A world success, the most famous German theatre piece to this day, also because it is all too easy to overlook, beneath the sparkling nasty wit and lascivious music, the evil, the profoundly antisocial! But when the illusion of theatre, of artificial realities, of the matrix fades, like narcotics losing their effect – then we look into all these murderers, whores, cheats, rapists as into a mirror! The scum of the margins of our society is in fact its black heart: the principle of competition, of pleasure at the expense of others, of preying, conquering and devouring.

Europe’s theatre of illusion has played out. Just as Brecht’s sexy gangsters enter the stage from the margins of good society – so more and more the crises from the margins and borders are invading our beautiful bourgeois theatre. Capitalism, which mutated into kleptocracy and from kleptocracy into war economy, mocks the romantic idea that trade and contracts offer protection from violence and greed Because that is precisely its true nature.

Mackie Messer became Mackie MeZer and the Z is shown on Tanks.

Ersan Mondtag dives deep into the horror under the skin of this snappy, offbeat play. A horror that is universal in a world where 3% own 97% of everything. Where people are burnt out by dictators as commodities and blackmail. Where philanthropists build bunkers for the apocalypse. Where the system wants to devour what it can get like zombies. Mondtag stages the nightmare so expressionistically and darkly that there is hope we will wake up startled – to see ourselves as what Brecht always believed in: not only as competitors or prey.

But as helpers and human beings.

A play for adult viewers.

Cast