Brecht set his script in 1830s London, though this, as he himself later indicated, was a fairly arbitrary location chosen in part to reduce the need for historical research. His version of the story satirised the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic. Though that particular target has lost its immediacy, The Threepenny Opera still carries plenty of weight as a critique of capitalism from a (by no means coherent) Marxist standpoint. Here is no proposal for a socialist revolution, merely a gleeful exposition of supposed outcasts playing as much within the economic framework as bankers and politicians (and, so to speak, vice versa). A world of beggars run by red tape, comfortable middle-class prostitutes (their commodity always in supply and demand) and London's most notorious bandit "thinking of going into banking".

I suppose the dawn of the cinematic age is a product - and accelerator ­ of the growth of capitalism in entertainment. My idea for a staging of the play influenced by the silent movie genre came first from the use of signs to introduce each scene, and as props within the play (part of Peachum's array of products designed to convince an audience, for instance), though the
exaggerated and stylised comic acting that the silent movie necessitated seemed an apt route to a fresh take on Brechtian excess. Equally, I wonder if, consciously or otherwise, these and other aspects of the silent movie genre influenced the development of Brecht's theatrical aesthetic.

We have been more reverent with the songs than the text, though I would hope there is nothing we have added or altered slightly that is not sympathetic to the play's aims. Playfulness combined with clarity has been our Holy Grail, and also an attempt to harness and exploit the grey area between the character an actor is performing and the actor in person. With so much material delivered directly to the audience, the challenge is to locate the speaker/singer. Is the actor talking as his character? As the actor playing his character? Both? Neither? Who does the audience represent for him?

- Adam Barnard, Director