One could almost be forgiven for thinking that Bobby Darin wrote
Mack the Knife. It would be an easy enough mistake to
make. Darin made the murder ballad his own, as Louis Armstrong had
done before him and as Nick Cave and Marianne Faithfull would go on
to do, though the "murder" in his version had been watered down to
"knock-about charm" and the "ballad" had been ramped up to "big
band swing ". The lyrics were certainly more violent than they were
in other such numbers on the American hit parade, though unless a
person knew any better there was almost no reason to assume that
there was more to the song that met the ear.
That Darin, recording Marc Blitzstein's 1954 translation of the
song, should have adapted it to his own ends is hardly surprising.
Since premiering in 1928, Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny
Opera, of which Mack the Knifeis only the most
recognisable number, has been translated into more than 115
languages and performed more than 10,000 times. It is likely that
the only thing these productions have in common is how different
each one has been from the last. The Threepenny Operais
to theatre what Invasion of the Body Snatchersis to
cinema: an urtext that can be reinterpreted time and again, iconic
and mutable in equal measure, allowing the phantasms and
preoccupations of the day to thrash themselves out in the light of
its critique.
That critique is a Marxist one, with its roots in the factory and
the union hall, and it is perhaps due to this thoroughly modern
characteristic that we tend to overlook the fact that the piece is
itself an interpretation. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera,
written in 1728, is widely considered the world's first musical.
But although it too has proved mutable over the years- Stephen
Jeffrey's The Convict's Opera, produced by the STC in
2008, gave it a loosely antipodean bent-it took the unwavering
moral outrage of early twentieth century radicalism to transform it
into the garish indictment of the industrial age it now is. In
The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes wrote that the
meaningless slaughter of World War One "brought our culture into
the age of mass-produced, industrialised death". For all the
ring-a-ding-ding charm of the musical's most famous number, it is
worth remembering that this is the age that Brecht was writing
about too, with his emphasis on the unavoidable fact that those
ordering the killing and those being killed were more often than
not divided by class.
This sense of outrage is at its most evident in The Second
Threepenny Finale, which remains the musical's most venomous
song, as well as arguably its best. "What keeps mankind alive?"
Macheath and Mrs Peachum snarl. "The fact that millions are daily
tortured / Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed / Mankind can
keep alive thanks to its brilliance / In keeping its humanity
repressed." Of the more recent recordings of this nasty little
number, those of Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, the latter of
which is one of YouTube's hidden treasures, manage to retain this
venom. The Pet Shops Boys' version, in unsurprising contrast,
retains only the words.
This is an important point. Brecht's essential anger, and the
unsettling charge it produces when teamed with Weill's knowing
evocation of the beer hall and the cabaret, is worth keeping in
mind when trawling through the performance and translation history
of the work. This is especially true when English-language
performances and translations are the ones you happen to be
trawling through. Blitzstein's was an Off-Broadway success and won
Lotte Lenya a Tony. (Lenya not only appeared in the German premier
some twenty-six years earlier, but also happened to be the
composer's wife.) But this same success was in large part due to
the softening of Macheath's character, less anti-heroic than
villainous in its German original, and the ironic but unsurprising
toning down of the piece's attack on capitalism and its
beneficiaries. This is exactly the sort of thing one has to be on
the lookout for when dealing with anything that comes to us in
translation.
Ralph Manheim and John Willett's 1976 attempt sought to correct
this essential error, pulling the musical off the Great White Way
and taking it back to the Weimar Republic, where artists such as
Cave and Sting embraced it as a result. Privileging the tone of the
original over word-for-word accuracy, Robert David MacDonald and
Jeremy Sams followed suit in 1994, with their unapologetically dark
translation for London's Donmar Warehouse.
There have been other notable translations since, such as Wallace
Shawn's in 2006, and a world of foreign-language productions that
is beyond the scope of this piece to address. But the general
direction in which they have been moving-out of the light and into
the darkness-is certainly a relevant one. We live in a time of Wall
Street bailouts and massive lay-offs, a slap on the wrist and a
bonus for the chief executive and crippling personal and household
debt for the rest of us. Written in the wake of cataclysmic
conflict, and on the eve of economic collapse, Macheath's famous
question retains its bite. "Who is the greater criminal?" he asks.
"He who robs a bank or he who founds one?" What makes The
Threepenny Operaso important is the manner in which it
demands we keep asking.
Matthew Clayfield
The Threepenny Opera, Sydney Theatre, 1-24 September,
2011.
Feature: Mack the Knife
Date posted: 11 Aug 2011Author: STC