The Threepenny Opera Themes

The Threepenny Opera is full of greedy, corrupt characters—men and women who lie, steal, cheat, and bribe their way through the world. Yet as Bertolt Brecht introduces these assorted denizens of the London underworld, he refrains from casting judgement upon their survival tactics, even when those tactics are unfair or immoral. In The Threepenny Opera, Brecht ultimately argues that a society built on greed, selfishness, and corruption essentially forces its people to become similarly greedy…

In The Threepenny Opera, the slick, cunning, and magnetic gangster Macheath has recently married Polly Peachum and thus angered her father, the powerful and corrupt Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum. Peachum, furious with Macheath for absconding with his daughter, devises a plan to send Macheath to jail once and for all. Macheath gets word of Peachum’s plan and goes on the run from the law—but because he decides to pay a series of visits to…

During his lifetime, Bertolt Brecht became well-known as one of the foremost (and most experimentally-minded) practitioners of “epic theater”—a theatrical form in which the audience is constantly reminded of their role as spectators, and in which the play or opera makes frequent nods to its own dramatic structure. Throughout The Threepenny Opera, Brecht deepens the self-referential aesthetic of epic theater by employing the use of character archetypes which add to the moralistic, cheeky plot…