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NT - Mack on Mav

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So, what's Mack the Knife really like? Well, there's only one person to ask. More information and tickets: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/threepenny-opera

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NT - One of 'the women' on Mack

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We wanted to interview someone who had been romantically involved with Mack the Knife. Here's one of several hundred who replied. More information and tickets: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/threepenny-opera

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NT -Tiger Brown on Mack

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Inspector Brown responds to suggestions of a personal relationship with Mack the Knife. More information and tickets: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/threepenny-opera

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NT - Peachum on Mack

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We interviewed distinguished local businessman JJ Peachum about the rumours surrounding Mack the Knife and his daughter, Polly. Warning: contains very strong language. More information and tickets: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/threepenny-opera

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NT - Polly on Mack

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Mack the Knife, in the words of his beloved wife. More information and tickets: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/threepenny-opera

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NT - Officer Smith on Mack

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What do London's law enforcement think of Mack the Knife? More information and tickets: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/threepenny-opera

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NT - The gang on Mack

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What's it like working with Mack the Knife? We asked members of his, er, organisation. More information and tickets: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/threepenny-opera

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NT Live: Writer and Director discuss their new interpretation

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NT Live: Writer and Director discuss their new interpretation

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Simon Stephens and Rufus Norris on The Threepenny Opera

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Director Rufus Norris is joined by writer Simon Stephens to discuss their new version of Brecht's play, The Threepenny Opera.

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NT Live - the challenges of playing Macheath

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The actor reflects on the challenges and rewards of playing Macheath in this new production of The Threepenny Opera. Chaired by Anne McElvoy.

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Macheath - some things to consider

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mac the knife is a classic anti hero character -- morally ambiguous -- showing charm and wit but also deception, violence and danger - the trick is consider these things when performing and writing about him.

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Peachum - some things to consider

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Three Penny Opera -- Opening and Peachum

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Some ideas about Peachum and his function within the play A very contradictory character - used by brecht to convey some mains themes such as the corrupting power of money and the deadening of human emotions.

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Polly Peachum - some things to consider

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polly undergoes a clear transformation in the play from young naive girl to stoic business lady --here are some thoughts on her character.

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How did Weill impact the overall style of the production? - great for justifying points around the songs.

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The Threepenny Opera as a parody - again - read this for great justification :)

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Brecht's and Weill's political standings - read for good justification points

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Read this simple summary to revise Brecht's alienation effect or Verfremdungseffekt.

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14 marks - Acting answer

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16 marks - Staging answer

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15/6 Staging lesson

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Reminders of the name of different ways you can stage a scene: blocks, flats etc.

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Lesson - staging with model MRDJ

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Indicative content for staging questions

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Directing an interaction - help sheet

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Directing a character (acting) - help sheet

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This is a film adaptation of the play - it's not great (Rotten Tomatoes gives it 1 star!) but it's quite nice for recapping rough plot and songs.

If you watch it, watch it with the text so you can keep up with the original version.

Don't take any character interpretations from this - they have really simplified the Brechtian style.

P.S The guy playing Macheath is also Gomez Addams in the Addams Family movies - he's better in that :)

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NEW MINI REVISION PACK: Brecht and his views on theatre

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Lesson 8/6: Model extract with indicative content list

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Lesson 8/6: Directing Mack and Tiger Brown

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BRECHT, EPIC THEATRE AND GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM - the revision guide

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WHOLE PLAY ANALYSIS - it's the revision guide just in case you lose it!

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WHOLE PLAY ANALYSIS - it's the revision guide just in case you lose it!

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND ORIGINAL PRODUCTION - you have this revision guide on paper, but it's here incase you lose it :)

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Threepenny Opera - original production and history

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NT video guides to using special effects

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National Theatre: Special Effects - YouTube

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The backstage team at the National Theatre are experts in all kinds of special effects. These film introduce some of those specialties, from pyrotechnics to ...

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NT guide to lighting productions

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National Theatre: Stage Lighting - YouTube

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Lighting, special effects and video are used to create moments of stage magic. The choices a lighting designer makes about how a set and actors are lit have ...

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BBC Music interview discussing Weill's Threepenny score - particulary referencing The Ballad of Mack the Knife

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The Threepenny Opera - Kurt Weill - Concerts, Introduction & Performances - BBC Music

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The BBC work page for The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill. Find upcoming concerts, watch performances, and learn more about the music.

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An MDs guide to The Threepenny Opera

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Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera: A Rough Guide For The M.D.

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A Few Words About the Piece: The Threepenny Opera is part of the Canon of Musical Theatre; it is the most important work of both Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and it deeply influenced later important works. If you decide to mount a production, you'll need to choose a version to do.

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Check out this video exploring Kurt Weill's work with Brecht on Threepenny

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The key work of the Berlin in the 20s & 30s section of The Rest is Noise festival at London's Southbank Centre is The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenope), the 1928 musical by dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill. Here, critic Alex Ross, Southbank Centre's head of classical music Gillian Moore, London Philharmonic Orchestra's principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski and singer Meow Meow, who is performing in the LPO's version on 2 March at Royal Festival Hall, talk about the work

Thanks to Festival dei Due Mondi, Spoleto, for footage of The Berliner Ensemble's production of The Threepenny Opera

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The Rest is Noise festival: Berlin, Kurt Weill and The Threepenny Opera - video preview

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The key work of the Berlin in the 20s & 30s section of The Rest is Noise festival at London's Southbank Centre is The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenope), the 1928 musical by dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill.

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The Dramatic Function of Songs in Theatre

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The Dramatic Function of Songs in Theatre

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The Dramatic Function of Songs in Musical Theater

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GCSE Bitesize page for Epic Theatre and Brecht

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BBC Bitesize - GCSE Drama - Epic theatre and Brecht - Revision 1

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Learn about Bertolt Brecht, devices that use the alienation effect, and Brechtian staging when discussing Epic theatre and Brecht for GCSE Drama.

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A journal article on the timeless power of The Threepenny Opera

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Review of the NT production - The Stage

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Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera - here self-consciously dubbed the 3 Penny Opera - is blessed with one of the great scores of modern musical theatre. Like Show Boat which opened the year before the Threepenny Opera premiered in Berlin in 1928, it was a true ground-breaker - but both shows also suffer from unwieldy books that make staging them today a challenge.

Their respective creative teams have come up with innovative solutions for both to make them newly viable. At the New London, director Daniel Evans has used a heavily edited new version of Show Boat that compresses its book while retaining all the glories of the score, while at the National, director Rufus Norris and playwright Simon Stephens have gone for broke with a staging and adaptation that convey the piece's complexities - a larger than life parable of amoral greed, subversive sexuality and being called to account by rough justice - in a way that is frequently bonkers. A gallery of grotesques is paraded before us. If it sometimes still feels overall like a bit of a scattergun mess, each of the elements has been individually so finely tuned that we surrender to the world that is being created.

This is a rough theatre staging - you do wonder if the National blew all of its musical theatre set budget on Norris's production of Wonder.land last year. The set on the yawning wide stage of the Olivier is made up of a series of wooden theatrical flats - half crescent moon flown in from the flies with an actor or two on board comprises the sole spectacle.

Instead, the lure and allure of the evening is provided by a crack company of performers, led by an insinuatingly sinister Rory Kinnear as Macheath, making a very creditable fully-fledged singing debut. He's surrounded by more experienced musical voices, including a scene-stealing opening rendition of Mack the Knife, sung by George Ikediashi, as the Balladeer, a performer best known for his cabaret alter ego, Le Gateau Chocolat.

There's also strikingly characterised work from Nick Holder and Haydn Gwynne as the Peachums, whose daughter Polly - beautifully sung by Rosalie Craig - marries Macheath. Debbie Kurup is suitably fiery as Lucy Brown, whom Macheath is also pledged to. It is also notable, because it's so rare, to see a wheelchair-using actor, Jamie Beddard, among the ensemble.

The music is given a jagged, full-blooded treatment by David Shrubsole's onstage band, and there's the added value that comes from the interpolation into the score of Surabaya Johnny from Brecht and Weill's less successful 1929 show Happy End.

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The Threepenny Opera review at National Theatre, London

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Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera - here self-consciously dubbed the 3 Penny Opera - is blessed with one of the great scores of modern musical theatre. Like Show Boat which opened the year before the Threepenny Opera premiered in Berlin in 1928, it was a true ground-breaker - but both shows also suffer from unwieldy books that make staging them today a challenge.

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Review of NT production - Independent

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"You've got to fake it to seem real," Peachum tells a snivelling beggar who has newly entered his employment. This snarling, sexy beast of a show has an elaborate pedigree: Simon Stephens has retooled avant garde dramatist Brecht's adaptation of John Gay's 18th century ballad opera. But these layers of artifice feel refreshingly straightforward in an authentically foul vision of London's corrupt underbelly.

At the play's heart, Macheath (he of ballad-turned-jazz standard "Mack the Knife") is a charming murderer with a sharp blade in his pocket. Rory Kinnear quips and charms his way through the role, his charisma more than compensating for the fact he looks about as sexy as a banker at his daughter's wedding. Both women and men fall in line: including Polly, daughter of Peachum, who runs a local begging racket. But her parents are far from thrilled, and they lay plans for him to meet his maker.

Director Rufus Norris's rough and ready approach mixes tatty Victoriana with jazz with a ramshackle live band. This DIY aesthetic could have been easily lost in the huge, barn-like Olivier, but he crowds the action to the front of the stage that teems with chaotic life and silliness. And Simon Stephens's lean adaptation scrubs the text clean of superfluous speeches or muddied plots, without erasing Brecht's grubby thumbprints. Every artifice is revealed and highlighted. Vicki Mortimer's endlessly flexible design is made up of a series of paper-thin stage flats, which actors burst through to make their entrances. And props are labelled in bold white capitals: Mrs Peachum brandishes a tin emblazoned with 'DRUGS', and sprays her drunken vomit from an all-too-visible tube.

This is a play with songs, rather than a musical. But even so, Rosalie Craig's performance as Polly is almost unhelpfully good - in "Pirate Jenny" she alternates between sweetness and raucous fury as she imagines commanding pirates to wreak equally sweet vengeance on the sexist men around her. Other cast members struggle to hold the audience, tackling challenging songs with more vigour than finesse.

But then again, vigour is what this production is all about. It's a filthy hymn to the power of Macheath's cock - and to the way that sex, charisma and money can utterly corrupt a broken society. Its climax doesn't absolve a single character from naked self interest - in this vision of a corrupt London no one, not even Macheath, is let off the hook.

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The Threepenny Opera, National Theatre, review: A snarling, sexy beast of a show

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"You've got to fake it to seem real," Peachum tells a snivelling beggar who has newly entered his employment. This snarling, sexy beast of a show has an elaborate pedigree: Simon Stephens has retooled avant garde dramatist Brecht's adaptation of John Gay's 18th century ballad opera.

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Review of the NT production - Guardian

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"Fake it to seem real," a would-be beggar is advised in The Threepenny Opera. To be convincing a vagrant must pile it on. And preferably carry a Brechtian label saying "Filthy".

Rufus Norris's production takes "fake" as its cue and puts showbiz at its centre. Everything comes as if from a bashed-up pierrot show or a violently coloured cartoon. The cops are so Keystone that they almost break into a kneebend chorus. Entrails of red wool spill out when someone gets stabbed. As a lascivious (and spectacularly vomiting) Mrs Peachum, Haydn Gwynne slithers around in scarlet like a question mark: an Otto Dix creature, who when it comes to half time yells "INTERVAL!", Nick Holder is spectacular as a Tweedledum-shaped Mr Peachum, in pin-striped suit, princess heels and a cheek-flicking bob. As Macheath, Rory Kinnear - spiv moustache, cuff-snapping three-piece suit - is short on magnetic sharkiness but his implacability sets up a sinister thrum. He also turns out to have a very pleasing singing voice.

Perhaps no production could live up to the brilliant penetration of Kurt Weill's score

There are luscious moments. Polly is vivaciously reinvented by Rosalie Craig as an accountant (specs and a limp floral frock) who can run Mac's affairs very efficiently when he is "away". Her duelling song with Debbie Kurup's Lucy (hot pants, afro) is one of the high points of the evening. The onstage band is strong.

Yet the overall effect is neither frightening nor jolting. Simon Stephens's scabrous adaptation - Mrs Peachum is a "skanky old witch" - lands some neat 21st-century jibes. Not least when Macheath, reprieved from the gallows, is promised a knighthood and an annual income of £50,000. But what is seen on stage wafts in an indeterminate epoch, contained in theatrical inverted commas.

Perhaps no production could live up to the brilliant penetration of Kurt Weill's score: sardonic, insouciant, insistent, it is at once utterly personal and completely declamatory. It has the impersonal melancholy of a foghorn, and the beat of city life. Norris's theatreland production has juice, but ends up looking less like satire than an accomplished musical. A programme note shows a sign at Berlin's Schlosspark Theatre during hyperinflation, declaring that the cheapest seat costs two eggs, and the most expensive a tablespoon of butter. I'd take a bun or two in my purse to the National. But not a whole loaf.
* At the Olivier, London, until 1 October Topics

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The Threepenny Opera review - cartoon counterfeit runs out of juice

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"Fake it to seem real," a would-be beggar is advised in The Threepenny Opera. To be convincing a vagrant must pile it on. And preferably carry a Brechtian label saying "Filthy". Rufus Norris's production takes "fake" as its cue and puts showbiz at its centre.

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This website has lots of information about the background, plot, characters, songs and productions around the world.

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A complete guide to The Threepenny Opera, with background information, history, synopsis, audio files, and more! Sponsored by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music.

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Review of the NT production - Express

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Written in haste and loosely based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, it is didactic, simplistic and sketchy. It owes its longevity entirely to its exuberant score, comprising such classics as Mack the Knife, Surabaya Johnny and the Solomon Song.

Compounding the script's failings, beleaguered National Theatre artistic director Rufus Norris has used a new adaptation by Simon Stephens, which is both predictable and crude. Stephens turns the cheating Surabaya Johnny unaccountably - and unrhythmically - into a City trader, grossly increases the licentiousness and crams the lyrics with adolescent obscenities.

The production is equally wretched. Played on bare platforms and against unpainted flats, it is that most incongruous of spectacles: a profligate version of "poor theatre". Norris fails to create a coherent acting style with Haydn Gwynne and Nick Holder, the undoubted stars of the show, opting for stylised expressionism and Rory Kinnear (exhibiting a pleasant baritone but inadequate menace) and Rosalie Craig (seemingly auditioning for Mary Poppins) playing it straight.

Although Norris's production eschews any sense of period Brecht and Weill set the piece in late Victorian England, which they saw as the epitome of bourgeois decadence. It is a world that Neil Bartlett knows well, having previously written a prose reflection on Oscar Wilde and theatre piece about Pre-Raphaelite Simeon Solomon.

He revisits the era in Stella, a portrait of Ernest Boulton (aka Stella Clinton), one of London's most notorious transvestites, who in his early 20s lived openly as the "wife" of Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, a wealthy Tory MP, and enjoyed a successful stage career on both sides of the Atlantic before dying aged 56.

Generally coupled with her partner-in-crime, Frederick Park (aka Fanny), with whom she was acquitted in a sensational sodomy trial, Stella here appears alone. Yet she remains part of a double act, for Bartlett depicts her in two guises: the younger Stella (Oscar Batterham), waiting for Lord Arthur to arrive on her 21st birthday, and the older (Richard Cant) waiting for death.

With Bartlett supplying little background detail, those unfamiliar with Stella's story may find some of it opaque. But his concern is less with conventional biography than with exploring the existential loneliness of those trapped between genders. Stella has the raw intimacy that marks the best of Bartlett's writing and is graced by deep-felt performances from the skittish Betterham and the stoical Cant.

In lighter mode, Rex Pickett, whose novel formed the basis for the Oscar-winning film, Sideways, has adapted it for the stage. Like the fine wines that the protagonists taste on their week-long trip through the Santa Barbara County vineyards, the subtler elements of the movie have not travelled well. But, while no one would hail this theatrical version as vintage, nor is it plonk.

It works best as a traditional odd couple comedy, in which sensitive Miles (Daniel Weyman) and brash Jack (Simon Harrison) find their attitudes to wine, love and fidelity increasingly at odds after they meet two free-spirited women (Ellie Piercy and Beth Cordingly).

The gentle humour gradually descends into laboured sexual farce but the cast acquit themselves admirably under David Grindley's fluent direction.
VERDICT 3/5 THE THREEPENNY OPERA National, London SE1 (Tickets: 020 7452 3000/nationaltheatre.org.uk; £15-£50)

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Written in haste and loosely based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, it is didactic, simplistic and sketchy. It owes its longevity entirely to its exuberant score, comprising such classics as Mack the Knife, Surabaya Johnny and the Solomon Song.

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Review of the NT production - it's detailed, linked to a contemporary audience and has some great production shots

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If you put on a production of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, how much does anyone care that the action is ostensibly set in the streets around them? My guess is that we understand when a setting is a stand in for 'far far away', and are happy to displace it in our heads to another similarly foreign location for the duration of the show. This question is at the front of the mind when watching Rufus Norris's new National Theatre production of The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Victorian London-set fable. This is no more a play about London than The Barber of Seville is about Seville, but putting it on the National stage means you can't avoid certain reflections on the city itself.

For Brecht himself in 1928, Victorian London was the very image of the bourgeois capitalist city, and thus a good place to set a myth about its myriad failings. To their credit Norris and translator Simon Stephens have chosen to lean into the grounding the locality provides, so that references to Rotherhithe and Canning Town don't come across as the meanderings of a slightly lost German working off a dated guidebook.

Part of the effectiveness of the London-setting comes in the earthiness of Stephens's script. The slightly distant quality of Brecht's words when translated over-literally is replaced with filth, and fury, and a kind of almost Falstaffian ribaldry suiting the East End down to the gutter. Stephens is a playwright who, when it's called for, can put contemporary spoken English to full obscene effect, and he relishes it here: we are left in no doubt which part of Macheath's anatomy is doing his thinking for him. Nor are we left in any doubt as to what kind of comradeship he and the chief of police enjoyed in their army days (the production follows the current trend of removing the 'sub' from any homoerotic subtext in the original play; while this can be a little on the nose, it is probably worth it as long as men kissing is still even a slightly surprising sight on the stage).

In many ways, however, this is a relatively purist Brecht production: Vicki Mortimer's extraordinary set is constructed in front our eyes, managing to appear both elaborate and eye-wateringly precarious at the same time as counterweights fly across the stage and large pieces of moving scaffolding come within an inch of seemingly decapitating cast members. This is theatre not so much with its heart on its sleeve as with all its other internal organs worn for all to see. Indeed, the slapstick element, with cops running after robbers in physical sequences that play like the demented dark mirror of Benny Hill, is one of the production's great trump cards. If the language is good at giving us the scummy undercurrent of London life, then the pictures on stage give us its equivalent: Hogarth by way of Keaton.

Fun as it is to see Brecht performed in a way we might imagine the Berliner Ensemble might have wanted it, all unpretentious bare bones and moving parts, I am not sure if the politics of the show come through clearly enough. For one thing, Rory Kinnear's Macheath, while every bit as shark-like as his entrance number suggests, is never quite seductive enough either in antiheroic charm or in singing voice to really sell us on the corruption of aspirational capitalism. And while Rosalie Craig's Polly is by far the standout performance, her extraordinary renditions of 'Pirate Jenny' and the 'Barbara Song' give such terrifying, vengeful bite to the gender politics of the piece that the class politics fades into the background. As with much Brecht performed today, when no longer agitprop the messages can become diffuse, and even contradictory.

Looking for contemporary resonance in the show might be a fools' errand, but with a kind of left-wing politics with which Brecht might have been at least passingly familiar in the ascendant it is a fun game to play. Yet the exhilarating tensions of the Weimar Germany it derives from - when the world seemed in flux and the only question seemed which flavour of street politics, left or right, would triumph - are far removed from the comfortable academic lives of the left's champions today. My chief thought watching the procession of pimps and whores and cut-throats was not only that Momentum members had never met them, but wouldn't want to. The moral portrait Brecht paints is one of humans running around London driven by animal instincts, rats in the capitalist rat race. 'It was for the tax advantages!' pleads Mack to a jilted lover to explain away his sudden marriage to another woman, sounding like someone taken in by a David Cameron-era Tory party soundbite.

But if this Victorian society is hardly a Big Society, it is not a society ripe for a Corbyn revolution either. The 'Ballad of the Easy Life' with which Kinnear serenades us upon our return from the interval mocks ascetics and intellectuals of the bearded Islington sort. He just wants his comfortable life, and will happily walk over such people to get there. Brecht of course is parodying the cut-throats of the free market, but it is significant that Macheath is an aspirational lower-middle-class businessman. At the very least Brecht would have wanted any decent revolutionary party to understand them before changing the system. But in Norris's production politics at street level is a carnivalesque tangle of gender struggle and disability rights, the false loyalty of a twenty-foot St George's flag and the sudden treachery of a sex worker. There are too many people out for their own gain for the grand common purpose of a Corbyn-Labour London.

The desired class-consciousness of Brecht's street-level theatre is not going to be the straightforward outcome on the audience of the National Theatre, I think. But this is still an excellent and timely production, and one that, given the hero's falling foul of the offshore accounts he has attempted to keep his money safe in, should remind us to keep track of just where money is going and who stands to benefit in this (still) most capitalist of capitals.
By Fred Maynard
The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, in a new adaptation by Simon Stephens, The National Theatre, playing until 1 October. For more information and tickets visit The National Theatre website here.

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The Threepenny Opera - The London Magazine

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If you put on a production of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, how much does anyone care that the action is ostensibly set in the streets around them? My guess is that we understand when a setting is a stand in for 'far far away', and are happy to displace it in our heads to ...

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Context notes - I'm not sure why this man is the thumbnail for this... but enjoy!

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SparkNotes: The Threepenny Opera: Context

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A short Bertolt Bretcht biography describes Bertolt Bretcht's life, times, and work. Also explains the historical and literary context that influenced The Threepenny Opera.

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Listen to the Original Cast Recording of the revival of The Threepenny Opera at The Donmar Warehouse (1994)

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From the Donmar Warehouse Production, Original Cast Recording

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Set design

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Set design - Richard Finklestein

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This is the NT's page on their recent production.

Browse it for production and rehearsal shots and interviews with the actors.

I would highly recommend buying the digital programme from this page too. It's full of articles and background to the play.

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National Theatre Live

Encore screenings of The Threepenny Opera will take place in select venues in the UK and internationally.

Find a venue near you

Ticket prices

Mon - Thu & all matinees
£45, £40, £34, £26, £15
Fri & Sat evening
£50, £45, £36, £28, £15

Audio Described performance
Saturday 1 October at 2pm

Touch Tour
Saturday 1 October at 12.30pm

Original photography (Rory Kinnear) by Jay Brooks.
Additional © Corbis, Shutterstock

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Encore screenings of The Threepenny Opera will take place in select venues in the UK and internationally. Find a venue near you Mon - Thu & all matinees £45, £40, £34, £26, £15 Fri & Sat evening £50, £45, £36, £28, £15 Audio Described performance Saturday 1 October at 2pm Touch Tour Saturday 1 October at 12.30pm Original photography (Rory Kinnear) by Jay Brooks.