Die Dreigroschenoper

In the organizer's words:

"Yes, just make a plan", sings Peachum in the SONG OF THE INADMISSIBILITY OF HUMAN STRUGGLE, because his plan doesn't work out either. Macheath, a man who seems to be even more radical in the pursuit of his goals, gets in his way and snatches his own daughter Polly away from him by marrying her without further ado. Even after almost a hundred years have passed since the premiere of DREIGROSCHENOPER in 1928, Brecht and Weill's punchlines and songs still sparkle. Both had transformed John Gay's English BETTLEROPER from 1728 into a play about life in modern capitalism, making it a worldwide hit. In the Staatsschauspiel Dresden's adaptation, the plot is set in present-day Germany with references to the present. Macheath dreams of seizing and overthrowing power through self-empowerment, while his opponent, no less brutal and obsessed with power, relies on legal means to achieve dominance.

Duration of the performance: approx. 3 hours.
One intermission.

The Threepenny Opera
in an adaptation for the Staatsschauspiel Dresden

Almost one hundred years ago, in the spring and summer of 1928, one of the most innovative and successful plays of the 20th century was created in the form of THE THREE-GROSH OPERA. Based on John Gay's THE BEGGAR'S OPERA from 1728, which Elisabeth Hauptmann had translated, Bertolt Brecht (text) and Kurt Weill (music) created the new play in several stages. In an early version, the new work still bore the subtitle DIE LUDEN-OPERER, before the focus shifted more and more clearly to the intertwining of state power and criminal business in the next stages of adaptation. Brecht's brilliant alteration of the original used the structure of Gay's ballad opera, but gave it a fundamentally new theme - criticism of the criminality of capitalism. To this end, he showed the power struggle between the gang leader Macheath and the entrepreneur Peachum, who runs a beggar's empire, embedded in rituals about family, marriage and bourgeois morality. The criminal as a citizen and the portrayal of the bourgeois-capitalist way of life as based on greed, robbery and deceit - this was the political explosive power of the DREIGROSCHENOPER when it premiered in Berlin at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1928. The biting irony was wrapped up in modern and jazzy music and great songs, but it was always present.

Almost a hundred years later, Brecht and Weill's critical revue of life under capitalism still holds up. The DREIGROSCHENOPER has become a modern classic and has often suffered the fate in stage practice that Max Frisch described as early as 1964 as the "resounding ineffectiveness of a classic", although his criticism was not directed at Brecht himself, but at its reception. After almost one hundred years of stage history, the Staatsschauspiel Dresden is attempting to put the DREIGROSCHENOPER into a contemporary political context with an adaptation. This experiment has been made possible by the generous and trusting support of the Brecht heirs and Suhrkamp Verlag, who have made this adaptation possible for the Staatsschauspiel Dresden as an attempt at a contemporary Brecht performance. This adaptation is an experiment, an attempt to create new and contemporary associations in the text of DREIGROSCHENOPER through limited textual insertions by the author Lothar Kittstein and thus to turn this play into a contemporary political play - which it also was in 1928.

The author Lothar Kittstein has been working successfully in various literary genres for more than twenty years. He has published plays and radio plays and was awarded the Würth Literature Prize in 2006 for his short story NORWEGEN. In his adaptation of DREIGROSCHENOPER for the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, Kittstein and the team led by director Volker Lösch take up Brecht's gestural theater and build on his linguistic style. Nevertheless, the topical insertions are recognizable and audible as such, and they should not be concealed. In order to ensure the connection between the play scenes and the new thematic settings, new terms have been inserted into individual lines of Brecht's text alongside closed textual insertions. Other passages have been taken from the above-mentioned early version from 1928, which was made available to us by the Brecht Archive.

Jörg Bochow