A noisy hotchpotch of stock operetta characters, American jazz, John Gay’s eighteenth century world of thieves, pimps and whores recast in a mythical Victorian London and all refracted through the decadent prism of Weimar cabaret.

Nearly eighty years on it is still an explosive work. Its classic status has too often set it at a comfortable distance, but in the world of sports-shoe sweatshops and stockpiled food, its questions still roar. Walking down the street, being asked for money by people living on the streets or watching cops in their tight black gloves moving people on, the city becomes fractured through Brecht’s prism. In 2008, Brecht’s salient take on the human condition couldn’t be more necessary for production.

Regarded as one of the most influential dramatic works of the twentieth century (indeed of any century), its music and songs, including the legendary "Ballad of Mack the Knife", are seminal to the development of both musical theatre and jazz itself.

THE THREEPENNY OPERA is vivid, wild, entertaining, dramatic, dark, funny, violent, sexy, provocative and very, very human.