The enduring popularity of The Threepenny Opera is often attributed to Kurt Weil’s music rather than Bertolt Brecht’s text. As director Barrie Kosky notes with characteristic hyperbole in the Adelaide Festival program for his new production with the Berliner Ensemble: ‘Weil … is as important for the history of music theatre as Wagner.’ Kosky attributes this importance to a certain ambiguity in the music, which he claims is lacking in the more straightforwardly parodic text. Alluding to the Brechtian ideas of ‘baring the device’ and the Verfremdungseffekt (variously translated as ‘alienation effect’ or ‘estrangement effect’), Kosky observes that ‘the mechanisms of the music are demonstrated … but it also has an effect!’ In other words, we recognise the artificiality of the music, but we are still moved by it.

In fact, the same ambiguity pervades all of Brecht’s writing and thinking, which advocates emotional distance while simultaneously arousing feelings of pity, horror, rage and injustice (as well as laughter). There’s a similar ambivalence in Brecht’s political philosophy, which hovers between a Marxist optimism that things might be otherwise and a more cynical pessimism that some things never change.