Profit and loss | 9 June 2016

Bertolt Brecht took The Threepenny Opera  from an 18th-century script by John Gay and relocated it to Victorian London. This National Theatre version wants to straddle the contemporary and the antique. Mack the Knife, an Afghan war veteran who murders strangers, contracts a bigamous marriage with Polly Peachum, the daughter of a cross-dressing mastermind who runs begging gangs across east London.

This laborious set-up takes an hour to establish and the drama gets started only when Polly’s mum vows to rub out Mack at a knocking-shop. A wise dramatist would have placed this threat in the opening scene. But Brecht isn’t a wise dramatist; he’s a preachy one and his purpose is to show that all human sin derives from the profit motive. Getting a handle on this rowdy, overconfident production is a struggle. Vicki Mortimer’s design can’t decide which decade to confuse with which. Mack, and lots of other characters, wear Roaring Twenties gear but the London police chief (leather greatcoat, holstered pistol) looks like a Gestapo officer from the 1930s while his capering constabulary wear the tunics and helmets of Edwardian bobbies. Quite a muddle.

The moral atmosphere feels puerile and dated. Who today would consider a serial killer a charming daredevil? We no longer regard beggars as decorative, swindling desperados. And our attitude to misogyny has developed since Brecht’s time. Polly makes her first appearance being raped, it would seem, on her wedding night. Later, a tied-up prostitute has her digits broken by a chortling sadist. The scene is played for laughs, of course, as is a sketch involving a line of madmen in straitjackets howling and shrieking for our amusement. The pageant unfolds with relentless nastiness enlivened by the odd song full of tedious swearing.