ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Weill, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. Aalto Musiktheater, Essen. 26 January 2008 and in repertoire
Reviewed by Michael Eagleton
Posted 23 April 2008

The curtain goes up on Essen's new Mahagonny to reveal one of those large concrete troughs so beloved of skate-boarders, in the middle of which are two large stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Out pops a Moses look-alike, who removes them to the left and right of the stage, where they will remain for the rest of the show. Only then does the music begin, and the three fugitives appear, carrying a couple of car tyres, to found the spider's-web city of Mahagonny. The Moses figure, acting as Narrator, continues to drop in on proceedings in various disguises. This Brecht/Weill piece is, according to the director Barrie Kosky, all about the Old Testament - a people looking for the Promised Land, enduring hardship in the wilderness, surviving natural catastrophes, obeying the rules. And, of course, there is a character called Trinity Moses.

Begbick - a conventionally blowsy Ildiko Szönyi from the resident ensemble, with a juicy mezzo - takes off her knickers, as Begbicks usually do, and throws them in the air where they are caught by a slowly revolving fan suspended from above, where they, too, remain for the duration. Thus the boundaries are set!

Jenny and her mates - a whole chorus of them rather than the six specified in the score - all pregnant and dressed in gymslips, are the first to arrive. Jenny is Marie-Helen Joël, another local girl, who really sings the part, and to considerable effect (making it a pity, perhaps, that the Crane duet is cut). Then come the four Alaskan lumberjacks, led by the Jimmy Mahoney of Jeffrey Dowd, in rather disappointing voice. They all wear brightly checked shirts, as lumberjacks do, but with bald heads, and long, thin beards which would surely have made operating a chainsaw a dangerous occupation. Fatty (an excellent Robert Wörle) and Trinity Moses (an equally impressive Heiko Trinsinger), and Begbick make them all feel at home, with a number of those fashionable office water dispensers providing whisky on tap.

But there are irritations. First, there never seems to be a moment when everyone is not jigging about to the music. In the 'gluttony' scene, in which a huge fatted calf takes up most of the space, there is so much peripheral action that the delicious bandoneon and zither duet accompaniment, on stage as Weill intended, goes unnoticed. And I cannot explain why the 'ewige Kunst' scene - a nice stage picture with bubbles being blown in the background, and our friend Moses himself in widows' weeds playing the piano - had to be spoiled by someone retching violently and noisily. Nor why, when the hurricane miraculously makes a detour and saves the City, all the girls give birth - Jenny to twins - in a gratuitously ghoulish piece of stagecraft. And there was more of shock value for its own sake, beginning with post-watershed sex and culminating in the gauging out of Jim's eyes and tongue.

At the end, Jim lies dead, shot by Trinity Moses, centre stage, while our Moses clone drives around on a contraption looking like a steam-driven vacuum cleaner, presumably clearing up the debris. The all-important chorus is banished to the top tier of the auditorium, compromising what should be a shattering climax, and making things yet more difficult for the Music Director Stefan Soltesz, whose conducting had already seemed lack-lustre.
Theatrical maybe. Thought provoking, even. But, bounded by cliché on the one hand and sensationalism on the other, nowhere near the piece that Brecht and Weill wrote.

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