Threepenny Opera (NT, 9 June)

A swing and a miss. The whole Brecht "thing"--the self-conscious acting, the sets labeled SET, that kind of business--was oddly mannered, as though repeating other Brecht performances seen elsewhere. There's a famous NY Everything Goes that superimposed Cole Porter's giant head over the stage and, so, the production; I don't know that the Brechtiness here was any more thoughtful. The effect was less "actors performing in a play, while remaining recognizably people with a life independent of their parts" than "actors doing Brecht." However fascinating this is from a critical perspective--theater professors, you may add another layer, "REIFIEID DE-REIFICATION," to your a-effect charts!--in person this was mostly dull, as setpiece after setpiece failed to come together. But not, you know, in that interesting not-coming-together way. This made me long for hipster Brecht in Chicago, where the actors' lack of prepation and the companies' lack of resources, relative to the mighty NT, kept everything from getting so rote. 

Rory Kinnear, of whom I expected the moon, was entirely adequate; Rosalie Craig an order of magnitude better than anyone else in the production. The presence of a disabled actor interesting, and the production didn't shy away from having characters mock his disability or ride his wheelchair around the stage; this was probably the thing that most consistently broke through the overall roteness, although I leave to others what particular morality, ethics, or even notion this was meant to convey.

Updated to the present in the most lazy manner possible; to be a London theatergoer is to be reminded umpteen times a week that the rent is too damn high, which isn't exactly a revelation. I don't think Bertie wanted us to think "gosh, those sets must have been expensive to rough up," yet that remains among my dominant memories of the production.

Brecht productions suffer at the moment from some of the the values of his theater having become basically normal for anyone whose theatergoing doesn't primarily consist of The Lion King. (Although I'd be first in line for the Berliner Ensemble Mamma Mia!) That Brechtian cynicism and weariness--or rather than post-Brecht, post-Bond, post-Kane, post-Everything descendent of it--informs our theater's default setting. I'm not saying the NT can't do Brecht--I treasure the memory of the Simon Russell Beale Life of Galileo of a few years back, however closely it hewed to realism. In fact I think that any kind of dynamic shift away from this kind of oddly commodified Brecht might be the most intriguing way to mount his work right now--at least in London, at least at the moment. Do it like a Tyler Perry film, do it in a trapeeze--just don't write LID on a lid and think you're shocking us.