Brecht’s play set in Nazi era is eerily similar to India’s present: Director

Mumbai: Bertolt Brecht may have set his play, The Threepenny Opera, at the threshold of the Nazi regime, but Imaad Shah feels that the

play

holds a good deal of relevance even today. Shah will be helming the seventh and final play to be staged under the

Aadyam

banner this year. The play will open over November 10 and 11 at the St. Andrew’s Auditorium.

“This play was written on the eve of the Nazi rise to power. The silencing of dissent, art, and media was not at all dissimilar to what we are seeing around us today. By the late 30s Brecht had to flee Germany and was already in exile. The play criticises cruelties of class and the high moral ground that the privileged assume against those who have to fight for their survival. In a country that favours the powerful and privileged and the gap between rich and poor widens constantly, thanks to the corruption in the system; this play is eerily similar to what we see around us,” explains Shah.

The production will see an ensemble cast comprising Arunoday Singh, Bugs Bhargava Krishna, Meher Mistry, Delna Mody, Saba Azad, Joy Fernandes, Uday Chandra, Rahil Gilani, Vivaan Shah, Suhaas Ahuja, Auritra Ghosh, and Shazneen Acharia.

The play’s music influenced by early jazz, opens with the song Mack the Knife. “Kurt Weill the composer was known as the enfant terrible of atonal music, but with the score for this play he has created a combination of complexity and catchy tunes,” adds Shah.

The text delves into the hypocrisy of the upper class while Shah injects India’s own understanding of the class structure that is different from the rest of the world. “ Elements of farce are used to puncture faulty assumptions. This play is not an opera but instead a reaction to opera. The thought was, if beggars did an opera, what would that be like? “Ramshackle, rowdy, farcical, sexual, scathing but always passionate and felt in the gut,” he says.