Erin Harrington reviews The Deadbeat Opera, presented by Free Theatre, adapted and directed by Peter Falkenberg, at the Pump House, Friday 6 September 2024.
Where Free Theatre’s 2023 adaptation of Woyzeck offered misery on tap, their new companion work, The Deadbeat Opera, is presented to us overtly, in the show’s opening preamble, as a low-life, low-budget (black) comedy for our times. The two works are in clear conversation, sharing much of the same creative personnel and artistic sensibility, the former’s grim tone retooled into something more playful and tongue-in-cheek.
This production is a collage of John Gay’s satirical ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Bertolt Brecht, Elizabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill’s lauded play with music The Threepenny Opera (1928), and some more contemporary music and concerns at around a 1:3:1 ratio. For the most part, the adaptation simplifies the earlier works’ storylines, and borrows liberally from earlier scripts and translations. Mr Peachum (Aaron Boyce, in great charismatic form), the self-proclaimed ‘beggar’s friend’, is ostensibly a man of charity, but runs London’s network of panhandlers and grifters with an iron fist. His daughter Polly (Sarah Clare Judd) has run off to secretly marry gentleman criminal Macheath (a very feline Hester Ullyart), aka Mack the Knife, in a parodic makeshift ceremony attended by Mack’s gang of criminals. Corrupt cop Jackie Brown (Chris Carrow), old wartime friend of Mack, butters his bread on both sides, first attending the wedding but then trying to hunt Mack down in a whorehouse, Mack’s old pimpish haunt, at Peachum’s behest. Nineteen songs and cabaret numbers pepper the show, frequently offering ironic contrasts to or commentary on the dramatic action.
Stylistically, the production embraces distancing effects that will be familiar to Free Theatre regulars: stilted and exaggerated modes of performance, odd juxtapositions of tone, deliberate framing of scenes, the inclusion of musicians as actors. The strongest elements for me are the many musical numbers, in particular an electric performance by recent NASDA grad Judd. As Polly, she delivers barnstorming, girlish, somewhat feral renditions of two of the best songs from The Threepenny Opera, “Pirate Jenny” and “Barbara Song”. It’s captivating; give that woman a cabaret show.
It’s a stylish production with a clear sense of carnival atmosphere, as well as excellent musical direction and performances from the band, although I’m not sure that some of the local references (such as to the beggars on Stanmore Road) and contemporary songs gel entirely with the earlier material. Production design, including lighting, is as consistent and strong as you’d expect from the company, evoking their strong signature flavour. We sit on long benches and church pews. A large, tilted open cube, like those used in the set of Woyzeck, provides a raised and raked playing space. It’s backed by a platform for the band (who double as beggars and thieves, much like in real life). It looks great from the back, although where I’m sitting sight lines are often seriously compromised, especially when performers are holding up signs. Strong costuming consists of a hodgepodge of historical styles, everything mired with grime. It’s all augmented by the excellent, idiosyncratic setting of the beautifully refurbished heritage buildings at the centre of the Pumphouse Demolition Yard, the fanciest wreckers in town, the brick walls lined with military banners, weaponry, and ephemera.
A strong aesthetic – but (a spoiler here) I’m a little bemused at the choice in adaptation to amend then ditch the final section of the story, Mack’s apprehension and trial. Characters offer an overt shrug about this abandoned narrative thread; I can’t quite work it out. In its dramatic presentation, as well as its marketing and press, the production signals that it is interested in Brecht’s socialist agitprop approach to social and economic hypocrisy, which is often provoked through politicised discomfort and contradiction. In that light, I don’t really understand the motivation behind replacing the original works’ satirical approach to narrative closure (that is, an execution that is halted in the name of the audience getting the happy ending they demand) with the offhand announcement that Mack’s in the wind, and that the story’s done.
Earlier versions of the work comment on earlier periods of revolution and impoverishment, per the programme’s framing of the show’s anachronisms, but this feels comparatively apolitical; if there’s a point, or motivation, it’s not clear (unless it’s about the bleak state of funding for the arts). I’m not complaining about fidelity, but a sense of coherence and purpose that feels like it should be essential to this mode of theatre. Perhaps the meaninglessness, or absurdity, is the takeaway: to hell with the human condition, the cost of living crisis, and the bestial didacticism of Brecht and Weill’s snarling song “What Keeps Mankind Alive”. Per the lyrics of Weill’s “Alabama Song”, which the cast sing as they head out into the foyer to sell us more drinks, “show me the way to the next whiskey bar – oh don’t ask why”?
For the most part, the opening night audience are warm and enthusiastic. It’s vear clear that many near us are throroughly entertained; some sing along or offer running commentary between drinks, tapping toes and having a boogie in their seats, one loudly describing the show as “a treat”. I’m pleased that people are into it – there really is a lot to admire and enjoy – although given the original works’ acerbic political ambitions and sense of anticapitalist class consciousness, I’m not sure if that response, or my desire for great cohesion and a stronger point of view, is the more bourgeois.
The Deadbeat Opera runs until Saturday 21 September 2024. Photo by Charlotte Crone.
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