Threepenny Opera

<p>One of Bertolt Brecht's best-loved and most performed plays <i>The Threepenny Opera </i>was first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble). <p/>Based on the eighteenth-century <i>The Beggar's Opera</i> by John Gay the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. <p/>With Kurt Weill's music which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre it became a popular hit throughout the western world. <p/>This new edition is published here in John Willett and Ralph Manhein's classic translation with commentary and notes by Anja Hartl.</p>