Donmar Warehouse production.
The play is set in London in the London of 2001. It is the London of the underworld, with its nasty nightlife in and around King's Cross, Stepney Green and the Soho. We are as familiar with the everyday reality of homelessness, begging, prostitution and petty stealing as was Brecht.
The well armed Police force is also a familiar sight. The level of Police surveillance was perhaps one of the only things that did changed since the play was written.
The production assists the spectators in developing a detached attitude to the protagonist. This is achieved by bringing the media into the theatre. Around the stage we Mack The Knife, the man who will gut you like a fish as soon as look at you... from the underworld to high society his cockney accent with its penchant for slicing people has become the essential ingredient in smart parties".
For most people however Mack the Knife is a harsh, violent repulsive man - no hero of the masses.
Urban killer
Mack is the ultimate urban killer, a "Great White Shark in Armani", about to graduate to the exclusive "clean" crimes of the City.
The famous career begins as a juvenile. He is discharged from the Army after stealing three submachine guns and explosives.
In London he hacks into the National Lottery computer system, raids banks, and deals drugs - specialising in the designer variety of course.
Mack the Knife is assisted in his career by his best friend from his days in the Major "Tiger' Brown, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
The Donmar Warehouse production is part of a revitalisation of old lyrics and music.
Only this time around they are shed of all traces of rosy sentiment. They have become harsh satires, criticisms of a Britain in decay. It's a million miles from Frank Sinatra's version of Mack the knife.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.76. 21 January 1995, Page 14 Facing mass unemployment, rampant employers equipped with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-won education, health and welfare services, the working class in Britain faces a real crisis - an avoidable crisis created by the historic failure of its official leadership.
Socialist Outlook exists to fight for a new type of working class leadership, based on the politics of class struggle and revolutionary socialism, to tackle this crisis.
The capitalist class, driven and politically united by its own crisis, its requirement to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has been given determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal class-war Tory high command.
The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions with legislation, and to fragment and weaken the resistance of the working class and oppressed, allowing them to pick off isolated sections Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legislative change. We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working class - the overwhelming majority of society - to topple the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital and establish its own class rule.
We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, working to link and unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of of pensioners, of the black communities and ethnic minorities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and throughout the world.
Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International. which organises co-thinkers in 40 countries world-wide.
Unlike some other groupings on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaim"This reminds me of Lenin's famous line about carburetors" Aid solution? One result of Republican gains in the US congressional elections [US aid budget faces axe, Socialist Outlook 75] will be the slashing of the aid budget to some of the poorest countries in Africa.
The $800 million annual Development Fund for Africa seems set for the chop. Of course we are not against aid to Africa or anywhere else that is ravaged by the effects of capitalism, but aid is not in any way a solution to the problems faced by the "Third Capitalist 'aid' is for capitalist projects - or do we believe that the US ruling classes, or at least the up-till-recently dominant sections, really are concerned about the world's black masses? Get real!
Finally the article lets us in on the idea that... prospects of the 'new world order' and the capitalist market improving life for the African masses seem further away than ever.' Well, did we ever believe that capitalism was ever making life better?
Steve Revins, Warrington. bia, a fear of cultural dilution, that subordinates Europeanism to pan-Germanism, Francophilia and British insularity."
In Oxford, Tony's superb booty is to get a hardback edition of Seumus Milne's The Enemy Within, recently reviewed