At its premiere The Threepenny Opera blew Berlin apart. It was modern, sexy, shot through with urgent, anti-capitalist politics, unashamedly shabby, full of hit tunes but with brutally honest or shockingly street-wise lyrics.

A noisy hotchpotch of stock operetta characters, American jazz, John Gay's eighteenth century world of thieves, pimps and whores recast in a mythical Victorian London and all refracted through the feral prism of Weimar cabaret.

Seventy-five years on it is still an explosive work. Its classic status has too often set it at a comfortable distance, but in the world of sports-shoe sweatshops and stockpiled food its questions still roar. Benedict Andrews' new production, using Jeremy Sams' brilliant new English lyrics, will unleash the beast.

"Walking home along Elizabeth street, being asked for money by people living on the streets or watching cops in their blue plastic gloves move people on, I saw the city fractured through Brecht's prism. His work remains a tool: to be used and criticised: to bring life kicking and screaming, suffering and loving on to the stage: to attempt to understand, to see afresh, to doubt."

"The work's most famous detachable song 'The Ballad of Mack the Knife' was written and inserted at last minute to counteract the eccentric costume insistence of a stubborn leading man.The next day and for months after the show was sold out. Within weeks the songs were being sung all over Europe, and Brecht and Weill had their most successful show."