The Threepenny Opera

(The National Theatre, 25 June 2016)

“It is good of you to come back. You did not have to, you know? You could has been outside instead, enjoying this wonderful new country we now have,” said Mack the Knife when opening the second act. The words came an act too late and were met with lukewarm applause. Pandering to the parochial, the play is set at an indeterminate time in London, during coronation. Would not have the audience been able to imagine the 1920s Berlin, the opera's original setting? Should have Shakespeare set Hamlet in Cornwall?

The programme and poster graphic designs project disdain for expertise (or is that the language of condescension towards the plebeian tastes of the working man?), the very disdain that has been feeding the demagogues of late and is partly responsible for the topicality of the second act’s opening lines. The programme is written by the commentators whose myopic ethics of envy give socialism and Marxism bad names. This ethics maintains that there is something moral in dividing humanity into “them” and “us.”

The disdain for expertise does not infect acting. Nick Holder’s performance (as Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum) lives up to his high heels, make-up, and the wig. Rory Kinnear (as Mack the Knife) is duly solemn, precise, and tragic. His is an everyman Mack the Knife, with no outside option in modelling business.

Rufus Norris’s direction is timid, however. Brutality is there, but the zest and abandon of cabaret are missing. The play takes itself a notch too seriously.

The play portrays a Hegelian—in many ways pre-Englightenment—Weltanschauung, wherein the world spirit shuffles around individuals: his pawns, the victims of circumstances.