If you’re penniless, you’re dead. If you’re in love, you’re dead too. Such are the unwritten laws in Mahagonny. In creating a city in the desert, Bertolt Brecht and Kurz Weill were also creating a brand-new society, exploring the values underpinning it. Their opera sets out a model of enduring relevance today, a laboratory in which we can reflect on the delayed effects of our liberalised capitalism. And I want to get the audience directly involved in this reflective process.

The body is always quicker on the uptake than the head. Anyone at the centre of an event is going to experience it in a different way to people watching onstage action from a darkened auditorium. That’s why my production of RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY uses the entire building of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. When audience members enter the opera house they’re stepping into the »City of Nets«, as Brecht put it, and getting entangled in these nets. The orchestra sits up on stage and the initial goings-on are beamed into the foyers. Live streams capture the arrival of the workers by taxi from Alaska. The singers and the 80 chorus members move freely amongst the audience.

There’s action everywhere you look: wild dancing, soap bubbles rising, trolleys dispensing sparkling Mahagonny wine. Prices fall like they do on the stock exchange, triggering a stampede to the bar. Yet the impression is of being adrift, of searching vainly for the centre of the roaring spectacle, of »something lacking«. For me, that’s the core take-away of the opera. It’s a feeling shared by Jimmy, one of the lumberjacks from Alaska. He’s arrived in a supposed urban paradise, determined after all his labours to do fun things (rather than actually taking pleasure from them). He soon realises that meaning is what’s missing. He realises there is no such thing as values; the capitalist machine is a purely Darwinist construct, empty of ideals: »If anyone does any kicking, it’s me; and if anyone gets kicked, it’s you.« Instead of finding a community, he finds himself in a dog-eat-dog world.

So Jimmy becomes disaffected with Mahagonny and its driving principle. Help comes in the form of a hurricane that threatens to destroy the city. Act 2 becomes an exercise in nihilism reminiscent of Karl Kraus’s »The Last Days of Mankind« and Marco Ferreri’s film »La Grande Bouffe«: society embraces its own self-destruction, its logic being: when there’s nothing left, we may as well die drinking and shagging. The audience experiences this second part of the performance up on stage, lounging on foam mattresses as if in a gymnasium. And in the hour of their auto-extinction they all attain a level of meaningful togetherness – as Brecht intended it in his acuity – although we’re still looking for ways to interrupt the nihilism and the destruction. 

The chances of striking Mahagonny-scale gold here are gone for good, but traces of merry-making are everywhere to be seen © Christian Knoerr, Dean Atkins – Alamy Stock Photo

 

Productions that take place in the audience’s midst follow their own playbook and are challenging in several respects. You’re working and rehearsing outside the ordinary routine and processes of the opera house. For a start, rehearsals follow their own timetable when the opera is spread throughout the building. In MAHAGONNY’s case the tricky thing is the synchronisation of the action, because I’m basically directing proceedings in different rooms simultaneously. It’s hard to pull off technically, too. The singers and actors, for their part, have to prepare for the unpredictable, surrounded by people, to gear up to react to situations in real time – situations that are never the same two nights in a row.

I see Brecht’s and Weill’s RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY as a call to question the role of theatre as a temple of entertainment. I want to find out what musical theatre is capable of, how it can nourish us at an ideational level. If we’re all working together to create something new, it can result in a societal utopia in miniature. Theatre then comes into its own as a communal experience that can change our perception of the world around us.