This theatre's loyalty to the playwright Vaclav Havel is beyond praise. As he prepares to stand down as Czech president, they are presenting the British premiere of a piece banned by the Prague authorities in 1975 after one performance - and you can see why the secret police stepped in. Havel ingeniously turns Gay's original play into a non-musical metaphor for the corrosion of the soul under communism.
Admittedly, Havel takes his time. At first, you wonder why he so explicitly shows Peachum using his daughter Polly as sexual bait, or why he gives Macheath such a lengthy justification for his erotic duplicity. Gradually, it becomes clear that virtually all the characters inhabit a world of spiralling mistrust in which "nothing is what you think it is". Peachum, for instance, is both a criminal boss and a carefully planted police agent. Macheath's sexual double-crossing offers an image of state treachery. And Jenny, who thrice sells him out, argues that only through betrayal can she discover her identity.
The weakness of Havel's srategy is that it takes him an act to establish the evidence that will prove his point: that the real sickness of communism was its creation of a Borgesian labyrinth in which every personal and social relationship was suspect. But Havel works out his idea with a mathematical brilliance that puts you in mind of his fellow Czech playwright, Stoppard. Along the way, there are all manner of delights. It is painfully funny to hear Peachum moaning to the police chief, Lockit, about the personal cost of "years of fighting crime while appearing to commit it". And Havel gets maximum irony out of the fact that the only honest man is a pickpocket who goes to the gallows rather than compromise his integrity.
Even if Havel's earlier absurdist plays have greater economy, you can understand why he regards this as a favourite: it is his most elaborate statement of the destructiveness of a world in which everyone is a potential informer. It is also well directed by Geoffrey Beevers, who allows the political point to emerge through a strict 18th-century formality. David Timson as the double-agent Peachum and Bruce Alexander as Lockit give their encounters a wonderful cat-and-mouse quality. And Caitlin Mottram as Jenny and Howard Saddler as Macheath excellently suggest that treachery carries its own erotic charge as the captain declares: "I love you because you betrayed me." In a sense that is Havel's ultimate indictment of a society where honesty is exiled and nothing is but what is not.
· Until February 15. Box office: 020-8940 3633. Tom Stoppard will introduce a special performance this Wednesday in aid of English PEN's Writers in Prison fund.
