A timeless "Mahagonny" set in a film studio by Ivo van Hove

©Annemie Augustijns

The famous opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, in short Mahagonny, with the libretto by Bertolt Brecht and music by Kurt Weill, tells the story of a city where, if paid for, there are no rules for entertainment (food, sex, boxing and drink), everything is permitted for entertainment. In this artificial city, people are prevented from realizing that their lives are empty and meaningless by spending their time with entertainment, so much that people are made to forget that they are human by dulling their feelings. So, the plot of the Mahagonny can be read as a critique of American society, so Mahagonny may represent Las Vegas, for example, or it may also describe the corrupted Berlin of the 1920s of the Weimar Republic.

Mahagonny, which premiered in Leipzig in 1930, was the culmination of a six-year partnership between Brecht and Weill. Like all cult and timeless works, it was met with protests (organized by sympathizers of the National Socialist Workers' Party) at its premiere, and the performance had to be interrupted, as was the case when Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was first performed in Paris in 1913.

Mahagonny, staged by Ivo van Hove, the artistic director of International Theater Amsterdam since 2001, formerly known as Toneelgroep Amsterdam, is a co-production of Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Nationale Opera & Ballet, The Metropolitan Opera, Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg and Opera Ballet Vlaanderen. This nearly three-hour production, which was staged for the first time at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in the summer of 2019, opened Opera Ballet Vlaanderen’s 2022-23 season at the beginning of September and is being performed alternately in the ensemble’s premises in Antwerp and Ghent.  

©Annemie Augustijns

Van Hove’s Mahagonny begins with a scene of a thin platform with several steps standing in the middle of an empty stage and a huge screen mounted on it. The stage gradually becomes crowded with both props and people, just as three fugitives build the city they call Mahagonny from scratch in the middle of a desert. The first to arrive in the city are prostitutes, with them a backstage consisting of make-up tables is placed on one side of the stage. Those who were dying of boredom in their cities (people walking in concentric circle describe a vicious circle of boredom), and then lumberjacks who found gold in Alaska and got rich flock to Mahagonny. Over time, the whole stage turns into a film studio: Standing light spots, cameras, multiple lighting systems suspended from the ceiling providing a shadowless light source, and huge green walls fill the stage.

©Pascal Victor

This time, perhaps more accurately than ever before, Van Hove uses his way of transferring the live footage from the stage to the screen/s on the stage, which is one of the dominant narrative tools in his stagings, in order to overlap the artificial entertainment city Mahagonny, which was established to make money on the leisure time spent by people and the film industry, where artificial entertainment has been produced for nearly 120 years. On top of that, Van Hove's use of the green screen effect in the second act, in which four types of entertainment are narrated, enables him to establish a direct relationship with Brecht's understanding of theater in general and with this work specifically in the context of the atrophy (artificialization) of human emotions. The live image taken on the movie set to the left of the stage, the back of which is covered with huge green panels, is shown live on the huge screen on the right of the stage, but superposed with pre-recorded background images. For example, in the sex scene, the woman with whom the men have intercourse one by one is not actually physically present on the movie set on the left, but her moving image recorded beforehand is superposed with the live footage on the screen on the right. Same way, the fact that a lumberjack, who will die at the end of the boxing match, is fighting with someone (or something) that is not visible on the screen because he is dressed entirely in green clothes on the set, conveys the fact that the inhabitants of Mahagonny (i.e., the men) turn into persons whose emotions are emptied by the artificial entertainment world, with actions they do not actually do. And that's exactly why, in the advancing scene even one person from the community does not support Jim Mahoney, another lumberjack who was sentenced to death in court for not being able to pay for the drinks he bought for everyone because he had no money. Nobody defends him, even his lover, prostitute Jenny, refuses to lend him money, so much so that all of them, with the temptation of the populist speeches of the three founders of Mahagonny, dig Jim's grave, participate in his murder, dismemberment, and become partners in being him the prey to wild capitalism. And the saddest and horrible part is that they do not hesitate to swarm over his corpse like vultures.

Van Hove staged Mahagonny both by remaining intellectually faithful to Brecht's understanding of theater, as I explained above, and by directing skilfully the gigantic cast of about 60 people on the stage, from soloists to choirs, from stage technicians to extras, thanks to the movement design he created with mathematical meticulousness. The creative team behind the scenes with whom van Hove is working for years include stage and lighting designer Jan Versweyveld, costume designer An D'Huys, and dramaturge Koen Tachelet. Thus, his personal style is clearly evident in this production as well.

©Annemie Augustijns

Conductor Alejo Peréz, who is the musical director of the production, masterfully interprets Weill's wide range of music, from jazz to madrigale, from funeral anthem to fugue, and ballroom dance rhythms throughout the piece, leading a group of approximately 30 musicians in the orchestra pit.

Leonardo Capalbo as a passionate and rebellious Jim Mahoney and Katherina Persicke as Jenny, the hard-hearted prostitute in need of affection, show off their acting skills as well as their competent singing. Mezzo-soprano Maria Riccarda Wesseling, who sang/played the Orpheus part in Pina Bausch's original -in German- production of Orpheus und Eurydice, works wonders not only with her musical interpretation, but also with her acting and her posture in Leokadja Begbick, one of the three fugitives who founded Mahagonny.

©Annemie Augustijns

Ivo van Hove calls Mahagonny, which he had dreamed of directing for years and is utterly in love with so much that he could stage it again each year, as “a parable for our time about people who are unhappy with their situation in life and who confuse prosperity with well-being” and continues: “Mahagonny tells a bleak story about the state of a society, about what people are capable of and how quickly things can get out of hand when they rally behind a single-minded goal.”

In this production, Van Hove does not directly relate to any current or recent violent or protest event, person, community or city, instead, he puts his signature under an ageless interpretation of a piece that will never get old by revealing the brutality of humanity that has fallen into the void of existence.

[this article was published in the tiyatro dergisi on 19th september 2022.]