Review: Kerjäläisooppera

BEGGARS DANCING MERRILY

When Knife Mackie walks across the stage, who can resist? There’s a walking stick and white smooth gloves, lace-up shoes, a knife in your pocket – a couple of steps dancing and a stab in the back from the shadows.
Like Mackie, the Helsinki City Theatre’s The Beggar’s Opera entertains just as it should, without remaining toothless.
The German Bertold Brecht wrote his big breakthrough, a musical play based on an old English folk opera, in 1928. Kurt Weill composed the music for The Beggar’s Opera from elements of cabaret, jazz and melody. Both the text of the play and the songs are completely ageless – after all, they come from the heart of modernism.

Director Kari Heiskanen has made the City Theatre’s The Beggar’s Opera seem spontaneous and loose. This has been achieved through very precise work. The orchestra sounds intoxicated and one-handed, in a wonderful and compelling way. The dance numbers and songs have the same natural roughness that amuses and delights.
A few times, the texts are lost in unclear articulation, but especially the solos of Vuokko Hovatta , who plays the girl Polly in the play, are absolutely wonderful vocally.
The ensemble carries its role excellently, especially Oskari Katajisto as Puukko-Mackie, Riitta Havukainen as Cecilia Peachhum.


The Beggar’s Opera is a multiple satire and turns everything upside down: What is bad, the dirty proletariat, has been brought to the stage of the theatre. Comedic clumsiness is achieved through skill. Vulgarly ugly speech makes a valuable audience laugh, because it is done in the name of Brechtian distancing. The implausibility of the story corresponds to reality.

The performance of Knife Mackie, Polly, Mr. and Mrs. Peachum, thugs, prostitutes and cheating beggars approaches a cavalcade of television sketches. But The Beggar’s Opera makes one doubt whether this is a mirror in front of the viewer. What do I think about this?

The texts of the play state that this is what a human being is like: to deceive, torment and persecute another until he has gained the last cent of benefit for himself. Human misery has not refined human nature, but has made the characters in the story extremely cynical.

The beggar’s opera does not present a picture of the life of the low-income people of our time at the mercy of capital. It gives way to the serious stigma of political theatre.
But it is a question of morality and humanity: If you laughed and enjoyed watching the ugly poor stumbling and obscene quips on stage, what should we really think of the real suffering and poor of today? What about the endurance of love, loyalty and friendship, are they true or is it only the low mind of a person after all?