ENO: Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny –London Coliseum

Writer: Bertolt Brecht

Composer: Kurt Weill

Director: Jamie Manson

Conductor: André de Ridder

In 1920s Berlin, the composer Kurt Weill hung out with the likes of Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, fellow composers who, while tremendously significant in the history of music and powerful advocates of New Music and twelve-tone techniques, were never focussed on writing tunes you could hum. Then Weill met Bertolt Brecht, a poet and theatre maker who thought songs would bring people into the theatre to listen to his political theories. Together they wrote The Threepenny Opera, stuffed with songs that were covered by Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, buzzy, transgressive theatre that had its audiences heading out into the Berlin night with their heads full of tunes.

That was 1928. In 1929 they wrote another one together, Happy End, also chock full of songs, and then, in 1930, they decided to compose a work for which ‘opera’ was a real descriptor, not a jokey dig at High Art. Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. On stage at the Coliseum in St.Martin’s Lane until February 20th.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny tells the tale of three intrepid capitalist adventurers, or possibly criminal exploiters, who decide it is easier to separate gold miners from the gold they have dug up in Alaska than going to the cold north to dig it up themselves. They establish a city (a sort of down-at-heels Las Vegas) on the coast that they run out of a shipping container and they call the city Mahagonny, which means either nothing much or The City of Nets if you believe one of its co-founders.

The city offers many carnal delights, chiefly eating, sex, bare-knuckle boxing, and excessive drinking. The city is threatened by weather events and outbreaks of morality, but no force in nature can wreck things as well as people being people, so the city implodes in its own decadence. In passing, we observe the fate of four Alaskan miners. Their demise, mostly while engaged in Mahagonny’s prime attractions, is the political message and the moral centre of the opera, particularly the fate of Jimmy Macintyre, the miner’s leader. His fate is the climax of the piece.

Brecht believed that theatre should teach, and that the trappings of theatre distracted, so empathising with characters was distracting, pretty lights and sets was distracting, forgetting the audience was sitting in a theatre watching an entertainment was distracting, so he employed what he called Alienation Effects – the lights would have no colour, the sets would show the workings of the theatre, the acting would be deliberately artificial, and every so often characters would burst into song, because singing isn’t realistic, it’s -well- stagey. The audience would thereby be forced to remember they were in a theatre, not looking at real events.

This production gestures to all these effects. The stage is bare, exposing fly lines and tallescopes and the brickwork behind the stage. The acting is artificial and heightened, although arguably that’s standard for operas, and the stage lights are deliberately visible. There doesn’t, however, appear to be a whole lot of investment in these devices beyond making the show Brechty. And watching an anti-capitalist show in the opulence of the Coliseum is an Alienating experience of and for itself.

The bare stage is employed as a style, not a thought-through theatrical device. The singing is naturally the raison d’etre for an opera production. The acting is woeful. The chorus mills around unless deliberately corralled onto the shipping container, which is effective once, but repeated many times. They form a long, disappointed queue, stripped to their deliberately unflattering underwear, to enjoy the ‘sex’ part of Mahagonny’s delight, which seems to consist mostly of standing in line. That’s a funny stage picture but it lasts for a very long time and becomes as interesting as looking at any old queue.

The principals frequently disappear into the milling chorus, which may be deliberate but takes away focus. It’s an extraordinarily undynamic production. The bare-knuckle boxing match which writes the death of one of the principles is tokenistic, obscured by the chorus, and features prominently boxing gloves. Perhaps the director didn’t notice the ‘bare-knuckle’ lyrics? Such a lot of standing around. Jimmy Macintyre demonstrates hurricane by whirling round a dangling lighting rig, but the momentary excitement thus engendered is swamped by a screen of chorus members standing there looking at him.

There’s a special joy in the too seldom appearances of dancer Adam Taylor, who is funny and fast and makes a splendid job of personifying the hurricane, wearing an arrow hat to show the folk that you don’t know where the destruction is coming from. There are two stylistic effects like this, the other being an uncredited actor who makes regular appearances dressed as a megaphone, to provide commentary in the manner of a placard. There are placards, too, beautifully lettered ones, but they are more for show than for commentary.

That’s the fundamental problem with the production. It doesn’t commit to any of its stylistic choices, so the symbolic costumes are perfunctory, the bare staging is just a set, the placards are there like ads for training shoes. There is a lot of recitative singing. There is Danielle de Niese as sex-worker Jenny Smith, who sings Alabama Song as a reminder that Weill could write a thumping good song. That and Adam Taylor being a hurricane are meagre fare for a long show.

Runs until 20 February 2026