“Fake it to seem real,” a would-be beggar is advised in The Threepenny Opera. To be convincing a vagrant must pile it on. And preferably carry a Brechtian label saying “Filthy”.
Rufus Norris’s production takes “fake” as its cue and puts showbiz at its centre. Everything comes as if from a bashed-up pierrot show or a violently coloured cartoon. The cops are so Keystone that they almost break into a kneebend chorus. Entrails of red wool spill out when someone gets stabbed. As a lascivious (and spectacularly vomiting) Mrs Peachum, Haydn Gwynne slithers around in scarlet like a question mark: an Otto Dix creature, who when it comes to half time yells “INTERVAL!”, Nick Holder is spectacular as a Tweedledum-shaped Mr Peachum, in pin-striped suit, princess heels and a cheek-flicking bob. As Macheath, Rory Kinnear – spiv moustache, cuff-snapping three-piece suit – is short on magnetic sharkiness but his implacability sets up a sinister thrum. He also turns out to have a very pleasing singing voice.
There are luscious moments. Polly is vivaciously reinvented by Rosalie Craig as an accountant (specs and a limp floral frock) who can run Mac’s affairs very efficiently when he is “away”. Her duelling song with Debbie Kurup’s Lucy (hot pants, afro) is one of the high points of the evening. The onstage band is strong.
Yet the overall effect is neither frightening nor jolting. Simon Stephens’s scabrous adaptation – Mrs Peachum is a “skanky old witch” – lands some neat 21st-century jibes. Not least when Macheath, reprieved from the gallows, is promised a knighthood and an annual income of £50,000. But what is seen on stage wafts in an indeterminate epoch, contained in theatrical inverted commas.
Perhaps no production could live up to the brilliant penetration of Kurt Weill’s score: sardonic, insouciant, insistent, it is at once utterly personal and completely declamatory. It has the impersonal melancholy of a foghorn, and the beat of city life. Norris’s theatreland production has juice, but ends up looking less like satire than an accomplished musical. A programme note shows a sign at Berlin’s Schlosspark Theatre during hyperinflation, declaring that the cheapest seat costs two eggs, and the most expensive a tablespoon of butter. I’d take a bun or two in my purse to the National. But not a whole loaf.
