Synopses & Reviews
Brutal, scandalous, perverted, yet humorous, hummable, and with a happy ending- Bertolt Brecht's revolutionary masterpiece
The Threepenny Opera is a landmark of modern drama that has become embedded in the Western cultural imagination. Through the love story of Polly Peachum and "Mack the Knife" Macheath, the play satirizes the bourgeois of the Weimar Republic, revealing a society at the height of decadence and on the verge of chaos. Complemented with music by Kurt Weill, it was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz into the theater, and the song "Mack the Knife" became one of the most popular and widely recorded songs of the twentieth century.
Review
"
The Threepenny Opera and
Mother Courage are the great plays of our time."
-Lillian Hellman
About the Author
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was one of the most influential playwrights of the twentieth century. Born in Augsburg, Bavaria, he fled Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power. Returning to Germany after the war, he founded the Berliner Ensemble and continued to work on plays and films.
Nadine Gordimer is the author of more than twelve novels as well as collections of stories and essays. She has received many awards, including the Booker Prize (for The Conservationist in 1974) and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991.
Norman Roessler is editor of Communications, the performance journal of the International Brecht Society, and is a lecturer at Temple University in Philadelphia.
John Willett (1917-2002) is a scholar and translator of several works by Bertolt Brecht into English.
Ralph Manheim (1907-1992) is a translator of works by Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Hesse, Günter Grass, and many others.