On the first Thursday of October, I went to BAM to see the Berliner Ensemble production of The Threepenny Opera. Naturally my standards for this play are extremely high: the affinity I feel for it extends beyond its title to a number of its qualities and themes, and I always find it easy to criticize the shortcomings of a less-than-ideal production. Luckily, Robert Wilson, who directed this German-language, English-supertitled production, was at his most astute, and the performances by the Berliner Ensemble regulars could not have been bettered. Though it was hardly a traditional interpretation of the work (Macheath, for instance, was played in near-drag as a strange cross between Marlene Dietrich and Charlie Chaplin), it seemed to get at the very heart of Brecht’s intentions, and for me it worked beautifully, weirdness and all.
The conceit behind the show was that we were seeing a version of a Weimar-era film, not unlike Pabst’s 1931 film of The Threepenny Opera (whose scratchy soundtrack played behind the opening scenes of this production), but with elements of The Blue Angel, Modern Times, Lulu, and other classic movies mingled in. From the initial parade of heavily made-up, grotesquely exaggerated characters across the harshly lit stage, to the final all-group rendition of the dourly ironic song that closes the play, this was a production that borrowed the black-and-white, judderingly edited, vaudeville-influenced look of late-silent and early sound films. Buster Keaton was there in the marvelous (and in fact nearly overwhelming) performance of Tiger Brown by the spectacular Axel Werner; both Keaton’s and Chaplin’s heroines seemed to underly Stefanie Stappenbeck’s spirited rendition of Polly Peachum; and Stefan Kurt’s galvanizing Macheath went from the dolled-up appearance of a Weimar transvestite to the fetchingly graceful manner of the Little Tramp—a genre-bending look that was accompanied, every time he opened his mouth, by a singing voice that marked him as a man even as it recalled Marlene Dietrich’s glamorously seductive tones.
For those who are used to sympathizing heavily with Mackie Messer, this performance may have seemed a bit too filled with Brecht’s vaunted Alienation Effect to work as theater. But for me it brought the character into balance with the play, giving him an appeal that was more theatrical than sexual, more unnerving than heroic. The fact that all the actors in the play knew how to follow Brecht’s technique to the letter—fixing the audience with their glittering, accusatory eyes while singing their discordant lines with purposely less-than-perfect tuning—made for a remarkable evening of theater. As one has learned to expect from Wilson, the pace dragged at times; had I been allowed to edit, I would have cut ten or twenty silenced-filled seconds from just about every scene in the first half of the show, reducing the total running time to something closer to its usual two-hour length. But I’ll concede that even the odd pacing was ultimately salutary, in that it gave a sense of propulsive rush to the later scenes, which were performed without the languorous pauses.
It was here, in the final minutes of Mackie’s near-hanging episode, that Wilson’s production really earned its keep. For as Macheath stood on the gallows with a noose around his neck and delivered his lines defending the relative innocence of small-scale “artisan” crooks—”What is a picklock compared to a bank share? What is the burgling of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”—the BAM audience burst into spontaneous applause. It was one of those moments when history catches up with an old play and makes it sound entirely new. What might have seeemed mere preachiness or tired dogmatism forty years ago, when I first heard these lines, now sounded like a rousing speech from this morning’s Occupy Wall Street demonstration. The opera had become true again.
***
I had a similar sense of being spoken to directly when I went the very next night to see George Clooney’s latest film, The Ides of March. This is perhaps less surprising, in that the film has just been released. But it is based on a play (Farragut North, by Beau Willimon) that came out in 2008, and that was in turn based on political events of 2004 and perhaps even earlier. So the echoes of our own present dilemma, however pointed they may seem, have entered in by serendipity, or perhaps by prescience, but not by direct historical imitation.
The Ides of March has been wrongly reviewed as a political thriller or a typical Clooney caper movie—the kind of cheerful, light entertainment in which we can identify with handsome characters, thumb a nose at middle-class morality, and enjoy a pleasant evening out. It could not be further from this. In fact, it is in some ways even colder, harsher, and more alienated than Brecht. If the movie is tense and in its own way gripping, that is not because we are dying to know the answer to the thriller questions; it is because we can somehow sense the downward spiral on which we have been launched. The despair of the movie’s ending is built into the idealism of its opening—and for those of us who had the highest of hopes for this administration when it was elected in 2008, that despair is recognizably ours.
Clooney and his collaborators have created a movie that is not about who wins or loses an election. Instead, it focuses on the sure but devious ways in which our national political process, broken beyond repair, inevitably destroys everybody who participates in it. There is nobody in this movie you can wholeheartedly like. Ryan Gosling, who puts on all his boyish charm for the role of deputy campaign manager working for the presidential hopeful, ends up devoid of any true emotion, dead-eyed and icily ambitious. And George Clooney gives one of his best, most restrained, and least lovable performances as the candidate himself. When this character smiles, it is with his mouth only—the expression never reaches his eyes. If we liberal viewers long for him to win the presidential nomination, it is because we love what he is saying: his advocacy of the Constitution over Christianity, his attack on the death penalty, his defense of the poor. When, in the end, he turns out to be just another compromising, compromised politician, the emotional impact is like a stab in the heart. If this movie is too depressing for the average ticket-buyer (and its sales figures would suggest that it is), that should not be taken as its flaw; on the contrary, it is its tremendous virtue as a truthful work of art. That stab in the heart belongs to us. Its cause is politics as we know it, in our own time, right now, when even the most blinkered observers are being forced to realize that something has gone very, very wrong.
—October 16, 2011