More is less: Die Dreigroschenoper becomes L’Opéra des quat’sous in Aix-en-Provence

As the distorted bombast of Kurt Weill’s overture to Die Dreigroschenoper plays, a scrolling text display renders Brecht’s narration that the audience is about to see an opera “as splendid as only beggars can imagine, and yet cheap enough for beggars to be able to watch”. The team at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, whose 2023 edition was opened by this performance, evidently missed the second half of the memo; with a substantial chorus and a regiment of stagehands and other backstage collaborators, this production is on the grand scale, with no expense spared.

It’s declared as being important for two big reasons. Firstly, it uses a new French translation, by Alexandre Pateau (the title in French is “l’Opéra de quat’sous”). Secondly, director Thomas Ostermeier and conductor Maxime Pascal have done a lot of digging in the archives to create a new edition whose purpose is to stay closer to Brecht and Weill’s original than the pack of modern productions, as well as adding some new material. The first of these innovations is highly successful. Pateau’s French is slangy, sassy and singable, while preserving the spirit of the German original. The second is questionable, with the evening bogged down by the additions.

It starts well, with the Ballad of Mack the Knife brilliantly sung by Claïna Claveron’s Street Singer, with just the right amount of swing and perfect balance between faux-innocent prettiness of voice and the threat in the lyrics. Unfortunately, things then began to unravel. The cast are actors from the Comédie-Française and it rapidly became clear that not all of them could sing to Claveron’s standard. Christian Hecq spoke the role of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum rather than singing it, which meant that the musical joke of the Lutheran feel of “Peachum’s Morning Chorale” was largely lost. Véronique Vella, as Mrs Peachum, and Marie Oppert, as Polly, are both decent singers and Oppert gave a more-than-acceptable “Pirate Jenny” (sung by Polly as per the original rather than by Jenny, as appropriated by Lotte Lenya), although both had a tendency to shout at the end of phrases that they wanted to emphasise, to the detriment of the musical phrase.

Then came Macheath and Polly’s wedding scene, into which was interpolated a lengthy sequence of custard-pie slapstick. This died, with barely a titter from the audience. The scene felt interminable and it was difficult to engage with whole performance from then on. Birane Ba looked the part as Macheath, slim, well groomed and sharply dressed, but there was little swagger and when he switched from being violent to his henchmen to sweetness and light to Polly, there was little charm on show. For the sung numbers, Macheath needs to command the stage vocally, and Ba was unable to do that.

Still, Ba and Benjamin Lavernhe’s Tiger Brown gave an entertaining song-and-dance for the Cannon Song. Vella sang an excellently cynical Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Elsa Lepoivre, as Jenny, provided some of the best moments of the show, acting the conflicted whore convincingly and singing persuasively both in duet (the Tango Ballad) and solo (the Solomon Song).

There’s no doubting the virtuosity of the musicians from Le Balcon and there was plenty of good playing, so the audience fully experienced the cognitive dissonance of Weill’s seductively catchy music and Brecht’s vicious lyrics. And there were plenty of musical highlights, most notably the instrumental repeat of the Cannon Song. But too often, the musical performance erred on the overblown. From the outset, Pascal overemphasised the percussive aspects of the score, drowning the lyricism, and some of the instruments, most notably the bass guitar, were over-amplified, drawing far too much attention away from the voices.

Ostermeier’s staging works well. The front of the stage is empty but for a quartet of microphone stands; irregularly shaped screens display a variety of projected video images, mostly faintly disturbing or reinforcing political messages. Stagehands are continually reshaping the rear of the stage with a variety of metal stairs and scaffolding. It adds interest without being obtrusive. English and French surtitles make it easy to follow the text even if your command of French street slang wouldn’t otherwise be up to the task.

This is an important production of a wonderful work that could hardly be more relevant at a time when anger at political conditions is boiling over into violence across France’s major cities. But it’s trying too hard in a number of areas and not hard enough in the singing. It’s a disappointment that I hope can be remedied in future revivals.