Review: Kerjäläisooppera

ENTERTAINING, GENUINE BRECHT

The first Brecht is a landmark case for everyone, those who have experienced the Bavarian boy’s epic theatre know that. I’m glad that for me it was the Helsinki City Theatre’s anti-bourgeois rejoicing The Beggar’s Opera, which is also called the Threepenny Opera .
A more critical and successful form of entertainment is rarely available in Finland on this scale.
Originally written by the British John Gay , The Beggar’s Opera was given new, more flamboyant clothes under the young Brecht and made a breakthrough on the big stages of Berlin at the beginning of the last century. The least thanks go to Weill, whose memorable, wonderful songs form the backbone of the Helsinki performance. There are no filler songs in the cavalcade of hits.
The London of the Beggar’s Opera , which beats the beaten, is boiling: gangster Knife Mackie (Oskari Katajisto) sows terror and pours down women like hay. Polly (Vuokko Hovatta) also loses her legs, and she doesn’t know how to say no when she comes across a slacker. What’s hidden under Mackie’s silk gloves?

The alienation effect, which famously interrupts the naïve empathy, alternately roars and whispers itself through the multi-layered police and villain game. The collapse of Brecht’s ideal world, along with stock prices and Christian morality, forms the atomic nucleus of the performance: First bread, then morality, demanding beggars and whores, citizens and victims of capitalist arbitrariness.
Director Kari Heiskanen has managed to persuade his team to tear up properly. The emptiness of the stage serves as an arena for the creativity of lighting and set design professionals, and under the distinguished direction of Nick Davies , the orchestra takes care of the tempo from the very first sheet song.
The professional joy of doing things is downright dazzling on the part of the actors as well. The gracefully charming Katajisto, with its nihilistic grin and Christ symbolism, meets the primal force it deserves in the women of Hovatta, Ursula Salo and soprano Laura Pyrrö . And let’s not forget the endearingly rude Chief of Police Chief Tiikeri-Brown (Kari Mattila).