The Threepenny Opera at the English National Theatre (Songs for the louche and low-life, 28 May) gave that theatre an unparalleled opportunity to intervene in our public life, as the authors, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, would have wished. “Robbing a bank’s no crime compared to owning one,” Brecht wrote in their next joint work, Happy End, a line he quickly transported back to the revived The Threepenny Opera. How this barbed satire might have resonated with today’s bankers’ millions. Instead we get, in Michael Billington’s words, Peachum as “a louche figure in high heels” and “a past liaison between Macheath and Tiger Brown”. Could anything indicate our decadence more powerfully?
Robert Leach
Selkirk, Borders
