East Meets Brecht: The First Soviet Threepenny Opera

• In Event: Trauma, Memory, and Resistance in Theatre and Film I

Abstract

In early September 1928, Jewish-Ukrainian-Soviet director Alexander Tairov saw a new production that had become all the rage in Berlin since its world premiere there two weeks before: The Threepenny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht and Elizabeth Hauptmann, with music by Kurt Weill. Upon returning home, Tairov immediately announced that he planned to stage the work in Moscow. His production, which premiered at the Moscow Kamerny Theatre almost a year and a half later, was to be the only production of any play by Brecht to appear on the Soviet stage during the playwright’s lifetime. This paper turns to newly discovered archival materials that reveal the lengthy, tumultuous process of contract negotiation and Stalin-era censorship and illuminate the substantial innovations of the production itself as critical context for understanding why Brecht was drawn to the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s and how he was received in Moscow in the years leading up to his famous 1935 visit.

Author

• Dassia N. Posner, Northwestern U