The Busker's Opera

Reviewer Helen Thomson
October 22, 2004
In <em>The Busker's Opera</em>, the history of popular music is strutted, mocked and celebrated.

In The Busker's Opera, the history of popular music is strutted, mocked and celebrated.
Photo: Charlie Sublet

Ex Machina, directed by Robert Lepage,
Playhouse until October 24

For those who saw Robert Lepage's epic farewell to the 20th century, The Seven Rivers of Ota, at the 1998 Adelaide Festival, The Busker's Opera has been eagerly anticipated. Its narrower range and absence of high moral seriousness makes it a very different work, one that needs to be understood and enjoyed not in a lengthy progression - Ota ran for seven hours - but rather in many teasing layers.

These consist of the history of one particular popular opera, John Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera, including its modern version by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera; the rigid gate-keeping of the Brecht and Weill foundations that closed a Lepage reworking of it; and a range of popular music that finds its most liberated forms in the hands of street performers and buskers.

Using the vehicle of Gay's comic opera, the history of popular music - but more importantly, its iconoclastic capacity to ridicule the orthodoxies of earlier forms - is strutted, blared, played, sung, mocked and celebrated.

The performers all have dual roles, alternating between playing instruments in the band with parts in the comic opera they sing at the front.

In mockery of foreign-language opera, all the songs are surtitled on a moving screen that also gives us close-ups of the singers' faces, a nice collapsing of the pretensions of high art into the lingua franca of film.

John Gay and Brecht/Weill used the low-life tale of Macheath and his women for political purposes, and Lepage follows suit. His target is the music industry itself, as willing to prostitute itself as is Macheath's whore Jenny.

A few more conventional political targets emerge, such as the Republican sheriff and his paranoid rave to the voters, and the patriotic enthusiasms of death row, where hamburger is served by line-dancing practitioners to the strains of country and western heartbreak. Of course it has been necessary to transport Macheath and his followers to the United States; first to New York, then New Orleans, and finally to the judicial execution capital of the world, Huntsville, Texas. This means we also have a musical tour of everything from disco to jazz, blues, rock, reggae, rap, and even some original Gay tunes.

With one or two exceptions, Lepage's performers are not singers, yet their story is told almost entirely in song. Furthermore, the lyrics are often as deliberately banal as their conversation. In combination with the high-tech staging and high-energy performances, the effect is to move beyond parody to satire of the entire music industry, embracing high as well as popular culture.

Need I say this is risky territory. Employing one art form to satirise another is one thing, but a singing satire of music is a high-wire balancing act that risks ridicule on the one hand and irrelevance on the other.

In fact, the show's weakness is a lack of certainty about the satire's continually moving targets. The musical parodies are lots of fun, and ironically demonstrate theatrical skill of a high order, but there is a potentially - and equally ironic - trap in their entertaining seductiveness. What was the audience applauding at the end of each "aria" or song? The revelation of the music's genre absurdities, or the skill of the performer, or both?

Yet this is precisely the kind of boundary-pushing we value in Lepage's work, and The Busker's Opera has a satisfying complexity that goes well beyond its musical parodies. But it runs out of energy and invention - forgivable in what is called a work in progress.

Advertisement Advertisement