Die Drei­groschen Oper

But when the illusion of the theater, the artificial realities, the matrix fades, like narcotics lose their effect - then we look into all these murderers, whores, fraudsters, rapists like a mirror! The scum on the margins of our society is in reality its black heart: the principle of competition, of pleasure at the expense of others, of robbing, conquering and devouring.

Europe's theater of illusion has taken place. Just as Brecht's sexy gangsters come onto the stage from the margins of good society, more and more marginal and border crises are penetrating our beautiful bourgeois theater. Capitalism, which has mutated into kleptocracy and from kleptocracy into a war economy, mocks the romantic idea that trade and contracts offer protection from violence and greed. Because that is exactly his true nature.

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

Ersan Mondtag delves deep into the horror underlying this biting, offbeat piece. A horror that is universal in a world where 3% own 97% of everything. Where people are burned 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 that we will wake up frightened - to see ourselves as what Brecht always believed in: not just as competitors or prey.

But as helpers and people.A piece for adult viewers.

Fotocredits: Magda Hueckel