The last horse to bolt from the Aadyam stable this season is the Motley production of The Threepenny Opera , helmed by debutant director Imaad Shah. The knockabout musical play was first performed in 1928 in Berlin, and although Bertolt Brecht is often listed as the sole author of the work, Elisabeth Hauptmann, his lover at the time, purportedly wrote the bulk of the text but remained uncredited for years (in a classic case of what is now colloquially known as ‘bropropriation’). The play’s provenance goes even further back, to John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in 1728, which was dubbed “the most popular play of the 18th century”, and translated into German by Hauptmann as working material for Brecht’s production with composer Kurt Weill.
In the play, Mr Peachum (Bugs Bhargava) runs an enterprise that caters to the sartorial needs of fake beggars and discovers much to his consternation that his daughter, Polly (Saba Azad), has got hitched to a conman of wide disrepute, Macheath (Arunoday Singh). This sets up a series of wild misadventures through the back-alleys of Soho as the Peachums try to extricate their beloved daughter from the clutches of Macheath’s gang of petty larcenists. This is the second production of a Brecht masterwork from Aadyam this year, after Quasar Thakore Padamsee’s take on Mother Courage and Her Children , with Arundhati Nag.
Given how popular the play and its music has been the world over, it is no surprise that The Threepenny Opera has had a chequered history in India as well. The play’s lampooning of capitalism, its scathing critique of bourgeois morality, and its empowering of the proletariat; made it particularly appealing to socialist-leaning theatre makers like Ajitesh Bandopadhyay. His immensely popular Bengali adaptation, Teen Paisar Pala , steadied the fortunes of Nandikar, then a fledgling theatre group struggling to stay afloat. The staging in Kolkata did have its detractors —Utpal Dutt criticised it for rejecting the play’s Marxist context, while critic Samik Bandopadhyay wrote that it “corrupts and destroys the basis of experimental theatre on the one hand and the strongly committed political theatre on the other.”
Similarly, P L Deshpande’s Marathi adaptation, Teen Paishacha Tamasha , was delivered to the stage by Jabbar Patel in 1978, and opened to a “phenomenally hostile press” that questioned both its fidelity to Brecht and its superficial tamasha elements as recounted in Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker’s Theatres of Independence. Deshpande included several original comic improvisations. The India Today review mentioned, “At the end of the play when Mack is about to be hanged, he accidentally calls for the prison warden Narayan, and God Vishnu himself appears on the scene.”
Other notable productions include the Hindi adaptations, Teen Take Ka Swang , directed by Fritz Bennewitz in 1970, and Do Kaudi Ka Khel , directed by B M Shah in 1992. Both were repertory productions for the National School of Drama. Closer home, Sunil Shanbag’s riotous Mastana Rampuri urff Chappan Chhuri (2008), adapted by Chetan Datar from both Brecht’s and Gay’s versions as well as Vaclav Havel’s non-musical adaptation, is credited with reintroducing live singing by actors in Mumbai’s suburban theatre, an attribute of performance that we now take for granted.
Weill’s music for the original was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre. Shah himself is not short on musical credentials, being one half of the Mumbai-based musical duo, Madboy/Mink. The other is Azad, who had directed Shah in a 2010 production of Duncan Sarkies’ Lovepuke and now returns as part of the cast of his first play as director. The palette of Motley’s production includes elements of punk rock, film noir, cabaret and jazz choreography. By Aadyam standards, it promises a sumptuous visual spectacle and concert experience (the cast includes singing stars Meher Mistry and Delna Mody) which will hopefully not belie the “constant sympathy for the poor and downtrodden” the blurb indicates.
The debutant director says, “I felt that the characters mirrored a lot of things we see in our society today. The vast differences in the lives of the extremely rich and the extremely poor, are dealt with in a really interesting way.” Shah shares he’s purposefully not adapted it to an Indian context because the original setting allows them to play with the absurd and be scathing about certain things. “I really felt Indian audiences need to think these somewhat uncomfortable thoughts and be confronted with the beautiful cynicism of this play,” asserts Shah.
The Threepenny Opera will stage today at 7.30 p.m. and November 11 at 4 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. at St. Andrews Auditorium, Bandra and on December 9 and 10 at Jamshed Bhabha Theatre, NCPA.
