AS PART of the Art of Regeneration programmes, The National Theatre's production of The Threepenny Opera returns to the Albany stage, in Deptford.

First performed in Berlin in 1928, playwright Bertolt Brecht creates a world of beggars, thieves, and prostitutes, where there is no honour and every character would sell out any other if an advantage were to be gained.

Relationships are betrayed and interchangeable as new alliances are formed among an array of seedy and colourful characters.

The Threepenny Opera tells the story of Macheath (Mack the Knife), a notorious bandit and womaniser who gets his lover, Lucy, pregnant, marries Polly, and yet still has a passion for a hooker called Jenny.

The legality of Mack's marriage puts him at risk of the gallows but luckily his buddy is chief of police.

From then on, his wife and her mother plot to bring the bounder down by bribing prostitutes, influencing the police and causing anarchy among London's beggars.

Brecht and Kurt Weill's masterpiece of musical theatre grew out of its writers' experience of life in Weimar, Germany.

They draw heavily from the period between the two World Wars when Germany struggled to establish a working democracy in the face of economic malaise and the bitterness of military defeat.

Director Tim Baker said: "This fast moving ensemble production re-explores (Brecht's) vibrant text and Weill's songs in a way which reveals their true power and intensity and asks crucial questions about our society today.

"It is a world of commodities, in which morality and loyalty are traded, swapped and bargained for like stocks and shares."

If Weill's jazzy, inventive and melodic score, captured in the Ballad of Mack the Knife and Morning Anthem, is your thing, you know what to do.

The Threepenny Opera, The Albany, Douglas Way, Deptford, Feb 14 & 17, pay what you can, 020 8692 4446