Summary
Art for art's sake is a concept only dunderheads in power don't understand. How ironic, then, that the most socially inclusive production of the year should be endorsed by a similar set of politicians so publicly, as if the accompanying PR exercise was an end in itself. Irony, too, given the current climate, that the same production should be an opera of all things, albeit a cheap and cheerful twentieth-century one.
Mercifully, Theatre Workshop's sprawl through Brecht's 1920s cops and robbers anti-capitalist classic, performed here in Hugh MacDiarmid's roughshod translation, captures much of the anarchic streak of one of Brecht and composer Kurt Weill's poppier works, if not always deliberately. Because Robert Rae's over-long if eventually rousing production is full of flaws. To be fair, some of them may be first-night ones, such as how the first act remains woefully underlit, or how sometimes the action is either so insular as to seem to be playing in its own vacuum or else descending into a messy guddle.See the full content of this document
Extract
Theatre the Threepenny Opera, Tramway, Glasgow 3/5
Yet, after a hesitant start, things g...
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