Abstract
ABSTRACT The Threepenny Opera: a learning play in a laboratory of a late Soviet school This article presents a case study considering key scenes from Bertolt Brecht’s play The Threepenny Opera that were performed in a Moscow school theatre of the late USSR, in 1982. Collective working under the conditions of a theatre laboratory engendered a new methodological approach referring to another Brechtian format, namely, the learning play. The article problematizes the self-reflective learning of the students and their teacher whilst working under theatre laboratory conditions on a Brechtian text. The self-reflective practices were discovered by the amateur actors through the sudden but inevitable effect of Brecht’s alienation technique within the emerging learning play format.
Highlights
RÉSUMÉ – L’Opéra de quat’sous: une pièce didactique dans un laboratoire d’une école de l’ancienne Union soviétique – Cet article présente une étude de cas portant sur des scènes clés de la pièce de Bertolt Brecht L’Opéra de quat’sous qui ont été jouées dans un théâtre scolaire de Moscou à la fin de l’URSS, en 1982
The research for this article focuses on pedagogical work on scenes selected by Yuri Friedmann from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928) for the school theatre at Moscow Hermann Matern School Nr 70 in 19821
The interview was conducted in the spring of 2019 for the forthcoming 16th symposium of the International Brecht Society (IBS)
Summary
The research for this article focuses on pedagogical work on scenes selected by Yuri Friedmann from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928) for the school theatre at Moscow Hermann Matern School Nr 70 in 19821. The staging of The Threepenny Opera school scenes was, undoubtedly, a pedagogical experiment in which Friedmann intended to give the school community, his students and even himself, a special lesson in political training/preparation (as was revealed a decade later, after the great change) He aimed to observe, together with the students, (while eliminating unnecessary explanations during the working process) how a political reality could unfold within a process of embodiment by speaking the simple words of Brecht’s play, by using repetitively the line Mister Mackie is wasting money, Mack the Knife is raising it from The Ballad of Mack The Knife. A school theatre laboratory turned, for those involved, into “[...] a protected, separate place where it [wa]s possible to continuously explore [...], without having to make compromises” (Schino, 2009, p. 9)
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