What is performance? And what was performance? I came to Berlin to think about these questions and continue that thinking here with the help of a peculiar pack of cards and a trip to the Berliner Ensemble.
Was ist „Performance“? Und was war „Performance“? Ich bin nach Berlin gekommen, um über diese Fragen nachzudenken. Diese Überlegungen führe ich hier mithilfe eines eigentümlichen Kartenspiels und eines Besuchs im Berliner Ensemble weiter.
At the start of Barrie Kosky’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper at the Berliner Ensemble, a single spotlight picks out a pale face peeking through the sparkly stage curtain. This is the face of The Moon Over Soho (played by Josefin Platt). She begins to sing: ‘Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne…’ Recognizing the tune, the theatregoers around me begin to hum and sway along to Kurt Weill’s music as we begin our three-hour journey through the London underworld.
I sat in this audience after a day’s work at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung. My time at the ZfL was drawing to a close. I had come there to think about performance, more specifically to study different ways of thinking about performance. I’d spoken with Katrin Trüstedt about Stellvertretung, with Falko Schmieder about Koselleckian approaches to conceptual history, and had the chance to share my own ideas with the Theoriegeschichte programme area. Yet, as I watched Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper unfold, I remembered an object sitting in my hotel room that I had not had a chance to share. I’d like to use this blog contribution to share it now, and so continue electronically some of the thinking I was so fortunate to do in Berlin.
This is the object:

This is a modern facsimile of John Bowles’s set of Beggar’s Opera Playing Cards. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was the inspiration for Die Dreigroschenoper; it was also an enormous theatrical success from the moment of its premiere in 1728. The first editions of Bowles’s cards date from this time, although they were then reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. I bought my facsimile because I believe that answers to the question of how to read these cards offered new ways of thinking about the performance, reception, and legacy of this famous eighteenth-century work.
First of all, we might read these cards as just another manifestation of the contemporary cultural impact of The Beggar’s Opera. In the wake of the work’s record-breaking, sixty-two-night opening run, various mementos began to appear, from paintings and engravings (the first Polly Peachum). The playing cards are a similar kind of product, cashing in on the popularity of the Opera. They are different from other objects, however, because these cards offer their owners a chance to engage with Gay’s work in a particular way: they provide all the information necessary to perform many of the songs, be that Gay’s lyrics, the musical score, or the name of the tune that Gay was giving new words to.

By providing such information, these cards thus extend beyond the theatre what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has described as a distinctly political aspect of performance of The Beggar’s Opera. Dillon argues that Gay’s audiences would recognize many of the ballad tunes he reused in the work, and perhaps even join in. Such recognition (or even participation) transformed the theatre into a shared space of common musical goods, and so resisted contemporary efforts to privatise and enclose previously public material. Bowles’s playing cards might allow such participation to continue after the performance ended, and at the very least seem to exploit the extent to which Gay’s work became an omnipresent aspect of a shared English culture.
But there are other ways of reading these cards, which extend and supplement the above interpretation. Palming through the cards, I notice that only two contain any information about plot. The ten of clubs tells us it depicts a song ‘sung by Polly and Lucy in their resentment against Macheath’. The six of clubs similarly contains a cue that explains the emotional stakes of the song.

Yet even these cards do not say why Polly and Lucy are upset, or even who Macheath is. This probably testifies, again, to the popularity of the Opera. It also, though, might suggest the unimportance of the details of the work’s plot, and so a way of understanding it more as a collection of sung performances loosely connected by events. A kind of eighteenth-century jukebox musical. Indeed, in the noisy and crowded theatres of 1720s London, where audience members would arrive late and leave early, and productions would be broken through short breaks between each act, a more fragmentary understanding of The Beggar’s Opera as a collection of memorable moments reinforced with music seems appropriate.
A translation of the theatrical work into the format of playing cards emphasises such an understanding because of the way that playing cards are used. If these cards were played with, they would, for example, have been shuffled, so that the songs they depict would be produced in a different order in every game. There would still, of course, be patterns: there are more cards with songs by Macheath than any other, as befits his lead role; Polly and Lucy are next, while Peachum only has one of his songs represented. Beyond this, the choice of cardgame might give new meanings to certain cards. The ten of diamonds was the ‘big cassino’ in games of cassino, and the player lucky enough to draw it would perhaps experience a version of the youthful joy expressed in the song by Mrs Slammekin it represents. The ace of spades (also called ‘spadille’) is a powerful card in lots of games, and here it is used for the song in which Lucy Lockit describes the power of Macheath’s kiss.

It is possible these choices are pure chance, but – even if they are – they are still evidence of how the transfer of Gay’s work from the stage to the cards can open it up for new meaning while exploiting the already fragmentary aesthetics of The Beggar’s Opera. Indeed, it is perhaps out of fear of gaining new meanings that one song is not depicted on the cards: Macheath’s strongest condemnation of corrupt English society, sung to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’ and explaining how ‘gold from law can take out the sting’.
There is more to say about these cards, and about performance than I have space to say here. Die Dreigroschenoper, for instance, is also a work whose songs have had an independent life, and which, by drawing on the aesthetics of the music hall, reimagines the ballad opera style of Gay. To my knowledge there is no cardset inspired by Brecht and Weill, although there is a Japanese rewriting of Die Dreigroschenoper called Hanafuda Denki (literally, Playing-Card Fantasy: 花札伝奇).
And there are also those people who sat next to me humming along to ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer’. We can understand those spectators’ engagement with the Berliner Ensemble production a little better with the help of John Bowles’s Beggar’s Opera Playing Cards. After all, the same aspects of Gay’s work that these cards once extended – be that the collection and adaptation of pre-existing music models or, as Dillon argued, the use of such songs in the theatre as a kind of shared cultural currency, radically available to all – are also some of the things that make Die Dreigroschenoper still a blockbuster theatrical experience today.

James Harriman-Smith is a lecturer in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University, UK. He was a Newcastle University-Leibniz Research Alliance Bilateral Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin.
@jharrimansmith.bsky.social
Title picture: Josefin Platt as the Moon over Soho in Die Dreigroschenoper, JR Berliner Ensemble.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Leibniz-Fellows (5. August 2025). On Peformances and Playing Cards. Value of the Past. Abgerufen am 10. November 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/14gly
