Op e ra
Slogans of Power
By DAVID CAIRNS
sat THE repertoire at Sadler's
Wells, already exceptionally
vigorous and varied, has been enlivened by a fascinating production, the first in this country, of The Rise and Fall 4 of the City of Mahagonny. Whatever the ambiguities and weaknesses of the work, what- ever the doubtful features of the performance, this is an immensely stimulating event, and no- body with the slightest interest in musical theatre should miss it. Precisely in what way it is stimulating is another matter. Having seen it so far only once, and coming to it innocent of all previous knowledge, I found myself at once riveted and detached, sympathetic but confused. The following remarks are personal, tentative, speculative, in no sense authoritative. Confusion is also evident among those who know Mahagonny. On the one hand we hear that Brecht's tremendous assault on. capitalist values was doomed to be blunted as soon as opera, with its maddenly consoling lyricism, was admitted into partnership. On the other hand we hear that the work is a great opera in which music rightly has the whip-hand, and even that it is the genius of. Weill's score which ensures continued life and vitality to a dated social document. There are those who prize the work for the beauty and compassion and indignant humanity of its music. There are those who see Brecht as the ironic victim of the soft but potent after-dinner art he despised and feared.
What is surely obvious at first hearing is that drama and score, much of the time, are not working hand in glove as they do in the great- est operas. The drama indicts. The score qualifies. The drama, in intention at least, is direct, single-minded, merciless. The score hedges, qualifies and deepens. This is not ex- actly Weill's fault. It is the fault of music, and of its boundless, vague evocative power. There is something about that sleazy jazz idiom, those saxophones moaning for a comforter, that softens and condones, however satirically they are used. They call up feelings of nostalgia and womb-like warmth, taking us down there into the deplorable corruption we know we should be rejecting with hatred. Often, where the shock of an uncomfortable truth should kick like a mule--as in Jenny's song at the end of Act 2— the ambiguity of the many-layered music deflects it. We cannot see Mahagonny the city of 'nets, the logical conclusion of capitalist society, fully and squarely as the unmitigated horror it is meant to be. It may be argued that it is part of the treatment that we should recognise and admit the symbol's lurking appeal to our squalider selves. Nevertheless the effect is to pull a punch that should wind us. The message, weakened, stimulates but also middles. It does not cauterise.
Brecht himself may also be to blame (again I speak from the experience of one production). The libretto, at least as interpreted at Sadler's Wells, seems to lack a consistently clear shape and purpose. In retrospect everything makes sense but at the time there are doubts. How does the audience know that it is supposed to
understand the hurricane (which advances in- exorably on Mahagonny, only to pass it by) in economic terms? (Or perhaps it isn't; if so, how?) NO does the principle of alternate want and excess seem to be embodied in immediately graspable theatrical terms. At one moment the pleasure town is fizzling out because there are restrictions on everything, the next moment it is a wild success after Jimmy Mahoney, the hero, has preached the doctrine of naked licence. This also breaks the curve of the rise and fall of the city, which is never shown flourishing like the green bay tree. Such reactions may be naïve and unintelligent, but they are valid up to a point—the point of basic intelligibility and instant theatrical impact which the work surely aims to achieve. We understand what Mahagonnyis getting at, of course, but not always how it is doing so.
The anti-Brechtian objection goes much farther and denies that the work, thrown up by the dying days of the WeiMar Republic, has any relevance to modern Western society. This pathetic belief, blind as the materialism that begets it, is clearly not held by the producer, Michael Geliot. Using photographs projected on to a three-panelled screen at the back of his barely furnished stage, Mr. Geliot tries to bring the fable home to us. In this he fails, I think, but from uncertainty of execution, not from the impossibility of the task. The projections are open to two criticisms. First, their function is not consistent and, as a consequence of this, too often it is not precisely clear what point is being made—which offends the canon of simplicity. Some of them are primarily illustrative—as when the 'hurricane' is accompanied by shots of ripped trees, shattered roofs and so on (which is itself misleading, if we are meant to see it as a symbol). Some of them point the moral— as when the boxing match between Trinity Moses and Alaska Wolf Joe is overshadowed by vast images of a scowling Hitler, a vacuously waving Chamberlain, and Adenauer, a wrinkled carrion crow—respectively the evil, the stupidity and the cunning and cynicism of power. Yet a third category indulges in savagely ironic juxta- position—the pictures of • starving Congolese children that stare down above the orgy in which Jake Schmidt eats himself to death, to `remind us,' as Kenneth Tynan has remarked, 'that we disapprove of starvation.'
The second objection is that such shocks are too easy. There is already a mechanism to absorb my, them, and their application is general where it should be precise. They make it possible, in a curious way, to treat Mahagonny as the thing Brecht dreaded—entertainment; the audience actually roars with genial laughter when a huge ticker-tape unfolds across the stage the legend (or words to that effect): 'The world will never live at peace so long as two-thirds of the world finds difficulty in living at all.—U Thant.' Our national capacity for taking the sting out of satire is hardly tested. Once again English satirists have spoiled an excellent case by 'not thinking hard enough before they fire, and have allowed the establishment to say there is nothing in it. If only Mr. Geliot had really applied Mahagonny and his mind to our own evils and turned his gaze sharply inwards on this island instead of vaguely outwards on the world. if only he had taken the hint of one of his own superbly successful projections—a map of England, sprawled on its back like a dying beetle, and chancted with the sores of abysmal cities. It is not only in Brecht's fabulous America that penury is penalised as a crime, sex defiled and devalued by commercial exploitation, men un- employed, authority eaten with smugness, art cheapened, and people lonely and unsatisfied. There are plenty of targets here only waiting for a keen eye and steady hand.
Perhaps one is asking for the moon, and this kind of art will never anglicise. Perhaps also such a simple message cannot be faithfully conveyed by great music. The objections I have stated are only meant to suggest reasons for my impression, formed on brief acquaintance, that Mahagonny is less than a masterpiece. But even the pulled punch, if not what was intended, makes you tingle. The production, let me add, is ingenious and convincing (most of the projections apart), and the do-it-yourself Mahagonny, assembled on the stage in the opening scene from the back of a great wheezing pantechnicon and consisting of movable plat- forms and skeleton walls, which Ralph Koltai has devised for it, is both practically and sym- bolically ideal. Whether it ought to be or not, Mahagonny is an opera, and it is performed as one, the bril- liantly inventive and effective score being played for all it is worth by Colin Davis and the Sadler's Wells Orchestra (which, incidentally, is differ- ent from the one heard in the theatre before Christmas and now on tour in the provinces, and to my mind distinctly superior to it). Patricia Bartlett has too soft-grained a voice and too mild a personality for the Widow Begbick, the master mind behind Mahagonny, but there are strong performances from !Ma Te Wiata and John Charley as her fellow criminals Trinity Moses and Fatty the Book-keeper. Ronald Dowd would be very impressive as Jimmy Mahoney if he would only rid himself of that whispering pseudo-mezza yore (so wrong and irrelevant in a performer of his natural intensity), and is impressive in spite of it. April Cantelo is not, apparently, the traditional Jenny, but her interpretation of the character— as a lost, starry-eyed shopgirl, caught .p by forces she has no conception of and mechanic- ally repeating the same brutal slogans as the rest, but with just enough 'different' about her to make her inevitable corruption most poignant—seems to me clever, moving and right. The chorus sings magnificently and acts as a team of finely directed individuals. In short, the show may confuse one on a single hearing; on it is still good 'enough to be seen many times
over.
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