Love and Sex Theme Analysis

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 former mistresses and prostitutes, he misses opportunity after opportunity to get out of London and hide out in the country. By illustrating Macheath’s insatiable and often ill-advised lust contrasted against the suffering of his jilted lovers Polly, Lucy, and Ginny Jenny, Brecht argues that love and sex are destructive forces which render men and women alike incapable of making sound, smart choices—a dangerous handicap in a world where a person must constantly have their wits about them in order to outmaneuver the forces of capitalism and corruption.

As The Threepenny Opera unfolds, Brecht incorporates elements of the sex farce or “bedroom farce,” a kind of light comedy which focuses on multiple iterations of romantic and sexual pairings throughout a bumbling cast of characters. Macheath’s exploits, albeit humorous for the audience, show how lust and love create diversions and conflicts which distract men and women alike from the real enemy: corrupt capitalism. Macheath is the central character around whom other players in the sex farce subplot revolve. In his romantic entanglements with Polly Peachum, Lucy Brown, Ginny Jenny, and the offscreen presence Suky Tawdry, Macheath finds himself distracted from his directive to evade a raid by the police drummed up by Mr. Peachum. Instead, Macheath is repeatedly drawn into whorehouses, reminiscences of past relationships, and spats with present and former lovers.

In the middle of their nontraditional wedding ceremony in an abandoned stable in the heart of Soho, a London neighborhood, Macheath and Polly Peachum get news from Macheath’s old army friend Tiger Brown—the sheriff of London—that Polly’s father, Peachum, wants Macheath hanged for absconding with his only daughter. Macheath attempts to go on the run—but winds up stopping off at a brothel in Wapping, another London neighborhood, to reconnect with his former lover Ginny Jenny. Jenny once allowed Macheath to work as her pimp, but has (unbeknownst to the gangster) conspired with Peachum to turn Macheath into the authorities. As Macheath prepares to seek shelter in the country after his wedding to Polly, he promises that he’ll be true to her and refrain from wasting his time with “secondhand goods.” However, as Macheath departs, Polly’s mother Mrs. Peachum steps forward to the front of the stage to serenade the audience with “The Ballad of Sexual Submissiveness”—a song in which she laments Macheath’s inability to resist the pull of his own lust. Macheath proves himself easily distractible from his own self-interest: his lust is too much to contain, and there is perhaps a part of him that also finds sexual gratification in close calls with the law. As Macheath tempts fate by running off to a brothel—and subsequently finds himself jailed,—Brecht shows how love and lust distract from survival in a dangerously corrupt world.

In jail, Macheath finds himself visited by Lucy Brown—Tiger Brown’s daughter, who is revealed to be Macheath’s first “wife” (though whether their marriage is or ever was legitimate is never revealed). A distraught Polly arrives and finds out about Macheath’s betrayal—but before the women can settle their spat, Macheath gets broken out of jail and goes on the run again. This time, however, he stops at the house of Suky Tawdry—yet another former lover and prostitute—and is apprehended and brought back to jail once again, this time to face the gallows. As Macheath seems to face certain death toward the end of the play, the other characters chide him for stopping off to visit Suky Tawdry rather than seizing his second unlikely chance at escape. The other characters make a fool out of Macheath for his frivolous choices—thereby demonstrating Brecht’s contempt for the ways in which the pull of “sexual submissiveness” distracts otherwise scrappy, intelligent people from their own self-interest.

Throughout The Threepenny Opera, Brecht shows how love and lust easily make fools out of men and women alike. This argument, however, is not the play’s most radical one—the deeper assertion Brecht makes is that in a society governed by the corruption and greed, lust and love are distractions and indeed liabilities meant to keep the impoverished working class from focusing on what truly matters: revolution.