Mack the Knife

Today at lunchtime James and I went to see A Play A Pie and A Pint at Oran Mor. This week’s offering is “Mack the Knife”. We invited Davie to go with us and I was extremely glad that we did so because it was one of the best plays that I have seen at Oran Mor. It was written by Morag Fullarton and was both funny and poignant. It concerns the staging in Berlin in the late 1920s of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Mack the Knife was its most famous song, sung by Kurt Gerron. Most of the play is about the disastrous rehearsals for the play and how everything went wrong in the months leading up to its opening night, with Kurt Gerron, Kurt Weill, Berthold Brecht and Lotte Lenya as the main characters. The acting and singing was first rate and the story of why they had to add in the song “Mack the Knife” to introduce Macheath was hilarious. But then the ending of the play was very sad; a few years later not all of them made it out of Nazi Germany in time.
When I was looking up all the characters later on the internet to check out the story, I discovered that the actress and singer Lotte Lenya (who escaped to America in the 1930s with her husband Kurt Weill) later became the James Bond villainess Rosa Klebb, with her trademark poison-tipped shoes!