The Threepenny Opera

"The beggars beg, the thieves steal, the whores whore. And the shark has teeth, and it wears them on its face..." Brecht's sharp-tongued travesty, in which the beggars and crooks act more bourgeois than good society, seems to have lost a few of its sharp teeth today, so natural has Brecht's critique of capitalism become to us. Here, crime is subject to the ice-cold laws of the market and love has a precisely calculated price. And so greed and pro...