The Three-Penny Opera
'What a miserable compromise, a parody with big ambitions, a cowardice, a treachery against a conquered insight.'Ingmar Bergman
About the production
In a program note to the production, Ingmar Bergman dates his first acquaintance with Weill's music to the summer of 1933, when he listened to the classical Lotte Lenya sing Jenny's ballad to the accompaniment of Lewis Ruth's band. It took some time before Bergman encountered Brecht's text, one reason being that it had been confiscated by the Nazis. Later, when reading the play, he was disappointed and repelled by its dry and matter-of-fact mixture of farce and tragedy. Brecht's cool objectivity towards his painful story bothered Bergman.
The critical divergences were so strong one might wonder if the reviewers actually watched the same performance.
The real problem with the production seem to have been similar to Bergman's staging of Camus' Caligula in Gothenburg a few years earlier. Two strong but divergent wills, Anders Ek and Bergman, imposed their artistic ambitions on Brecht's work.
Sources
- The Ingmar Bergman Archives.
- Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide, (Amsterdam University Press, 2005).
Collaborators
- Lars Egge, Street singer
- Anders Ek, Jonathan Jeremia Peachum
- Hjördis Petterson, Mrs Peachum
- Gertrud Fridh, Polly Peachum
- Edvin Adolphson, Mack the Knife
- Ulf Johanson, Jackie Brown
- Ann-Mari Wiman, Lucy
- Eva Dahlbeck, Pirate Jenny
- Georg Skarstedt, Wally the Weeper
- Ragnar Falck, Jakob
- Alf Östlund, Matthias
- Victor Andersson, Robert
- Rune Andréasson, Ede
- Gösta Prüzelius, Jimmy
- Folke Hamrin, Smith
- Erik Liedholm, Police constable
- John Melin, Reverend Kimball
- Emy Storm, Dolly
- Teeri Stenhammar, Molly
- Julie Bernby, Nellie
- Gita Gordeladze, Betty
- Astrid Lindgren, Vixen
- Bertolt Brecht, Author
- Stig Rybrant , Conductor
- Kurt Weill , Music
- Ingmar Bergman, Director
- Eric Söderberg, Designer