The Threepenny Opera

This is an alternate cover edition of ISBN: 0413390306.

First staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble), The Threepenny Opera was Brecht’s first and most outstanding success. Based on John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera, the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic despite its setting in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill’s music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theater, it became a popular hit throughout the western world. Filmed three times, it remains one of Brecht’s best loved and most performed plays.

This new translation, first staged in 1975 at York Theatre Royal and subsequently at the Adelaide Playhouse and the Lincoln Center, New York, is by the joint editors of Brecht’s Collected Plays in English, John Willett and Ralph Manheim, who have also equipped this edition with Brecht’s own notes and discarded songs as well as with an extensive editorial commentary on the genesis of the play.