“It’s wickedness that keeps a man alive.”

The Threepenny Opera shines the floodlights on a shadowy culture of materialism and money-grabbing. Beggars are trained professionals, whores are glamour girls and the underworld is running the show. This cut-throat, cutting edge production by student company Opera Warwick places theatre side-by-side with new media to create a panorama of the greedy glitterati and grasping gutter folk in a dystopian twenty-first century.

Backstreet front man of the show is ‘Mack the Knife’, a thieving, bigamist, murdering, back-alley businessman who has seduced wide-eyed child of the on-screen generation, Polly Peachum into marriage.

But in this world, matrimony is a bargain and love is even cheaper. Macheath is finally brought under the spotlight, backed by a live jazz orchestra and silhouetted by the camera’s flash.