Interview: Rory Kinnear on James Bond, Hamlet, singing and #piggate
This is a bit more bloody like it. For me, the only blot on the record of new-ish National Theatre boss Rufus Norris is the disproportionate amount of his first year spent tinkering with Damon Albarn’s not-very-good musical ‘Wonder.land’, when it might have been better just to discreetly dump it in the Thames.
Perhaps that production was just too squeaky clean for Norris, who is on home turf with Brecht and Weill’s ragged satirical classic ‘The Threepenny Opera’. Literal home turf too: Brecht’s play with songs about the dire consequences of inequality could only be set in one place – good old London. Top playwright Simon Stephens’s filth-encrusted adaptation largely succeeds in having and eating its grubby cake; aesthetically it conjures up a grimy, crime-infested East End in a manner both nostalgic and condemnatory. And though Norris’s production seems to be set loosely around the time of the writing of ‘The Threepenny Opera’ (1928), the casting is a delirious celebration of the diversity of modern London, with notable turns from cabaret star Le Gateaux Chocolat – who sings the show’s iconic theme, ‘Mack the Knife’ – and Jamie Beddard, who has cerebral palsy and frequently steals scenes by bellowing obscenities from his wheelchair.
Like many Norris shows, the atmosphere comes first. A lot of money has been lobbed at making it look rattled off and barely staged, but there’s a gothy, cartoony aesthetic to Vicki Mortimer’s design that makes it all tremendously fun. Characters yank on useless bits of ‘backstage’ machinery and Haydn Gwynne’s fearsome Celia Peachum barks ‘INTERVAL!’ at us when it’s time for an interval. But actually it’s a lavish affair on the sly, even if it is seething with the sardonic energy of a play originally knocked together in six weeks.
Rory Kinnear acquits himself well in his first ever singing role – as an incorrigible, polysexual Macheath (aka Mack) – even if his blokey accent, frequent attempts to account for his sexual high jinks and lack of actual knifing (beyond the camp opening sequence) amount to something closer to a loveable rogue than Brecht imagined. However, he does bring a steely force to Weill’s songs about the pernicious effects of poverty (and would clearly make a fine Sweeney Todd).
First-class honours perhaps inevitably go to alt musical queen Rosalie Craig, whose precise, passionately picked paths through the wordy lyrics are mini dramas in their own right. She’s also a formidable actor, and her take on Mack’s bookish moll Polly Peachum has an agreeable iciness. No single actor runs off with this boisterously dirty show, though – there’s only just room to mention Nick Holder’s splendidly grotesque turn as Polly’s cross-dressing gangland father Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum.
I’m not sure that Norris’s production makes a case for ‘The Threepenny Opera’ as a masterpiece outside of the songs, but I did have a fantastically good time: a gleeful gob in the eye of gentrifying London.