What a story, so beguiling and shrill – the milieu of gangsters, that exotic thrill of crime in the moonlight of Soho! A world success, the most famous German theatre piece to this day, also because it is all too easy to overlook, beneath the sparkling nasty wit and lascivious music, the evil, the profoundly antisocial! But when the illusion of theatre, of artificial realities, of the matrix fades, like narcotics losing their effect – then we look into all these murderers, whores, cheats, rapists as into a mirror! The scum of the margins of our society is in fact its black heart: the principle of competition, of pleasure at the expense of others, of preying, conquering and devouring.

Europe’s theatre of illusion has played out. Just as Brecht’s sexy gangsters enter the stage from the margins of good society – so more and more the crises from the margins and borders are invading our beautiful bourgeois theatre. Capitalism, which mutated into kleptocracy and from kleptocracy into war economy, mocks the romantic idea that trade and contracts offer protection from violence and greed Because that is precisely its true nature.

Mackie Messer became Mackie MeZer and the Z is shown on Tanks.

Ersan Mondtag dives deep into the horror under the skin of this snappy, offbeat play. A horror that is universal in a world where 3% own 97% of everything. Where people are burnt out by dictators as commodities and blackmail. Where philanthropists build bunkers for the apocalypse. Where the system wants to devour what it can get like zombies. Mondtag stages the nightmare so expressionistically and darkly that there is hope we will wake up startled – to see ourselves as  what Brecht always believed in: not only as competitors or prey.

But as helpers and human beings.

A play for adult viewers.

Thomaspeter Goergen

Krzysztof Zawadzki is evidently enjoying the role, and the pleasure is shared by the audience. It’s hard to wonder why, as the costume and make-up seem to imply this approach to the character. Zawadzki’s Peachum is startlingly reminiscent of (…) Jack Sparrow from “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and he has a flair similar to Johnny Depp. (…) This is one of the best roles in the play. I’ve already mentioned the outstanding Anna Radwan, who is amusing and terrifying by turns, romping through her vis comica. Yet Magda Grąziowska steals the show as Polly. Marvellously corrupt, rotten to the bone, beneath the make-up of an infantile doll, Macheath’s profoundly cruel wife eventually becomes a leading character. (…) Anna Radwan brilliantly sings the “Ballad of Sexual Obsession,” but hers is a compelling “Pirate Jenny” different from all the rest—to my mind it was the most striking moment of the production.
Jacek Wakar blog.pl/recenzje

Cast of dubbed roles in February 2024:

February 8 and 9 – Anna Radwan, Paulina Kondrak, Alicja Wojnowska

February 10  – Beata Paluch, Paulina Kondrak, Magda Grąziowska

February 11 – Beata Paluch, Paulina Kondrak, Alicja Wojnowska

The play is under the patronage of Onet.