PENNY PLAIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 914, 15 February 1957, Page 16

PENNY PLAIN

CANNOT say that I got much out of Marc Blitzstein’s Englished Threepenny Opera. The work seemed to have suffered a lamentable sea-change in translation, and the sardonic lyrics, reduced to the sentiments and size of American musical comedy, had no real bite or tang. What the characters performing it were forced to do, therefore, to point the satire, was snarl, instead of sing, and this they did throughout. The plot, doubtless quite coherent in the theatre, seemed excessively involved, although I know Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and have seen the German film of the Threepenny one, to those knowing neither, it must have been baffling. But if Berthold Brecht has suffered in translation, the composer, Kurt Weill, has not suffered at all. His brilliantly sour score still superbly hits off the vigour in despair of those days immediately before Hitler, memorably described by Arthur Koestler in The Invisible Writing, and by Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin stories. I vividly recall the film, made, I think, in 1932, of the Dreigroschenoper, which I saw some years ago, a work of great sting and saltiness, and salt is what this American version lacked. For The Threepenny Opera is still vital, and its themes are more contemporary than ever. Its translation had the air of being considered a historical document.