Opera Scotland

Dreigroschenoper 2023Berliner Ensemble

Read more about the opera Threepenny Opera

The new Festival Director, Nicola Benedetti, and her team only had a few months to prepare the programme for her first Festival.  Clearly, given the notoriously long lead in time for opera, there was never going to be any significant full-scale production on display.  It was therefore good to see a regular visitor, the Australian director Barrie Kosky, bringing his Berlin company to Edinburgh.   He is known in Britain largely as a director of opera, however in Berlin he has also worked extensively in cabaret and music theatre, so the first collaboration of Brecht and Weill was right up his street.  It also made a useful contrast with his next job in Britain, Covent Garden's latest Ring cycle.  

It is many years since the Berliner Ensemble last visited Edinburgh, but this hybrid piece, part opera, rather more music-theatre, is in the company's blood.  Its source work, The Beggar's Opera, was staged at the Festival in 2018, so it was good to be reminded of the 1920s updated version.

The first point to make is that there was a superb jazz band on hand - six musicians in addition to the brilliant American conductor, Adam Benzwi, who also played keyboards, doubling on piano and harmonium.  There was no sunken pit - these players were only slightly lower than the front stalls seats and were able to stay in close contact with the goings-on on stage. Apart from the trumpeter, the musicians played two, three, or even four instruments - perhaps the most surprising being Otwin Zipp, who doubled on trombone and double bass.

The set consisted of a spectacular group of mobile climbing frames that filled the proscenium. Presumably representing the buildings of a big city, they gave plenty of occasion for the actors to clamber about in pursuit of one another, frequently singing from exposed positions at altitude.  Barrie Kosky's staging was excellent and appropriately sharp.

The cast was made up of singing actors - i.e. actors who couldn't just sing a bit, but actually sang very well most of the time.  And given the climbing that most of them needed to do, a good level of fitness was required. There were no weak links in the ensemble - some had been with the company for five years, a couple were recent recruits.

It was a long show - three hours, only a third of which was music. The dialogue sequences at times seemed a bit prolix.  Surely when the piece has been done by British companies the translated texts (by such luminaries as Hugh McDiarmid and Robert David MacDonald) must have been substantially pruned. It was also noticeable that the amplification was sometimes on the loud side - a bit taxing when the evening can already seem long.

Note that the third performance, on a Sunday, started at 5,00pm - a useful precaution given the possible difficulties over late transport.