Character Clues

Character Analysis

Actions

How can we put it? The bad guys in this play are very bad. So Mac is known to kill, rape, lie, steal… you name it, he'll do it. Brown, his best bud, takes bribes for allowing all of this to happen, meaning he's pretty much just as guilty. Lucy, Brown's daughter, lies about being pregnant to gain Mac's sympathy, and shows no remorse for her dishonesty. In The Threepenny Opera, everyone is behaving badly, and there are no regrets.

Family Life

Family as a cozy institution of bourgeois society takes some pretty serious hits in The Threepenny Opera. Both the nuclear family and marriage as an institution are slammed by the characters' portrayals of family relationships.

Polly, for example, wants to marry Mac, and doesn't seem to worry too much that he has another girlfriend as long as she's the main squeeze. Lucy lies about being pregnant so that she'll be Mac's "real" wife. Meanwhile, the Peachums are upset that Polly is married, but not because they don't approve. It's because they think they'll lose income if their daughter isn't around. Family relationships reveal how the characters are motivated by power and position.

Occupation

It's almost a joke, but the characters in The Threepenny Opera represent various sectors of society through their occupations. The joke comes when you realize that they're basically all in the same business: conning their neighbors in order to make a buck.

Mac is a professional thief who runs his gang like a business. Peachum is a shopkeeper whose business is actually to control a gang of beggars. Brown is the High Sheriff of London, so he has to act a little bit more respectably in public, but his corrupt relationship with Mac makes him just as bad as everybody else.