Play: The Threepenny Opera

Overview
Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), with music by Kurt Weill and freely adapted from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, is a caustic satire of bourgeois morality and capitalist society. Premiering at Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, it fuses popular song, cabaret, and sharp social critique. Brecht’s epic theatre techniques interrupt the illusion of realism, asking spectators to judge, not merely empathize. The result is a gritty, tuneful parable that exposes the collusion of crime, business, and the law in a modern economy.

Setting and Characters
Set in a stylized Victorian London on the eve of Queen Victoria’s coronation, the play centers on the underworld figure Macheath, “Mack the Knife”, a suave, ruthless gangster. Opposing him is Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, proprietor of a beggar “trust” who outfits the destitute for maximum pity and profit, and Mrs. Peachum, equally hard-nosed. Their daughter Polly becomes Mack’s unexpected bride. Tiger Brown, the city’s police chief and Mack’s wartime comrade, embodies the cozy overlap of policing and criminality. Jenny, a prostitute and Mack’s former lover, and Lucy Brown, Tiger Brown’s daughter and Mack’s rival claimant, round out a world where affection, loyalty, and justice are priced commodities.

Plot
The play opens with a street singer’s “Moritat” introducing Mack’s crimes. Mack courts Polly and marries her in a stable, with stolen furnishings and a band of thieves standing in for a pastor. Outraged, the Peachums resolve to destroy their new son-in-law. Peachum pressures Brown to arrest Mack and threatens to unleash an army of beggars to disrupt the coronation if the police fail to cooperate.

Polly proves capable, managing Mack’s gang when he goes to ground. Brown cannot bring himself to move decisively against his friend, but Peachum turns to Jenny, who betrays Mack for a reward. Arrested in a brothel, Mack briefly escapes, visits Polly to secure his finances, and then seeks refuge with Lucy. A jealous confrontation between Polly and Lucy exposes Mack’s duplicity. Betrayed once more, Mack is recaptured and condemned to hang.

On the day of execution, Peachum’s massed beggars force the authorities into a public-relations panic. As the noose tightens, a messenger arrives on horseback with a royal pardon. In an absurd avalanche of clemency, Mack is not only spared but ennobled and granted a pension, a pointedly artificial “happy ending” that mocks operatic convention and the state’s arbitrary dispensation of mercy.

Themes and Style
Brecht strips sentiment from melodrama to reveal structural violence beneath respectable order. Money is the true sovereign, determining love, law, and morality; the Peachums’ “charity” is a business, the police are partners in crime, and Mack’s predation mirrors the market’s logic. Songs halt the action to comment on it, preventing immersion and prompting critical distance, the Verfremdungseffekt. Numbers like “Pirate Jenny,” “The Cannon Song,” “What Keeps Mankind Alive?,” and Polly’s “Barbara Song” articulate competing desires, revenge, camaraderie, survival, while exposing the hypocrisies of class and empire. The finale baldly states that cruelty born of hunger and poverty outstrips individual villainy.

Music and Impact
Weill’s score blends jazz, tango, and street ballad, its catchy surfaces undercutting the lyrics’ bitterness. “Mack the Knife” escaped the stage to become a global standard, an irony consonant with the play’s critique of commodification. The Threepenny Opera became a cornerstone of 20th-century theatre, reshaping musical drama and spreading Brecht’s epic techniques, projected titles, direct address, episodic structure, into mainstream practice. Subsequent productions and translations have kept its razor edge sharp, as its portrait of a society where legality and criminality share a ledger remains disturbingly familiar.