2023-10-19 03:53:00
Alexandre Pateau’s work highlights a secondary version of the German author’s play that he rewrote many times.
The Threepenny Opera is brought to the stage of the Comédie Française by Thomas Ostermeier until November 5, an excellent opportunity to read the new translation by Alexandre Pateau (collaborator of Libération), published in May, on which rightly supports the director. Bertolt Brecht used his text many times and it is the versions from 1931 and especially from 1955 (translated into French by Jean-Claude Hemery) that we have been used to reading or seeing performed until now. Pateau’s translation is instead based on the 1928 libretto, printed in a small number of copies the same year as the first performance of the Opera at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin. A less theoretical version than the following ones, written in haste and with great excitement by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, but also thanks to the translator Elisabeth Hauptmann, long forgotten behind the overwhelming duo. In Alexandre Pateau’s translation “Mackie-le-Surineur” becomes “Mac the blade”, and the book brings together a rich critical apparatus: writings by Brecht on his opera at the time of its creation or later, but also La Bosse , a cinema script taken from the play by Brecht himself, and the Threepenny Trial where the author returns to the bitter experience of the adaptation of his opera by Pabst and develops several of his theses on the theater educational and the “spectator-smoker”.
Bertolt Brecht, “The Threepenny Opera”, “The Threepenny Film”, “The Threepenny Trial”, edition and translation by Alexandre Pateau. The Arch “Open Stage”.
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