In Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 The Threepenny Opera, a pointed satire on Weimar Germany, we are never too far away from its original, The Beggar’s Opera. John Gay’s hugely successful ballad opera, first performed in 1728, opens with Mr Peachum, the Fagin of his day, mulling over his account book, reviewing the recent takings of his gang of thieves and pickpockets. In Simon Stephens’s smart new adaptation of Brecht’s opera, accountancy still works as a motif for society’s values. But this time, it is Polly Peachum who’s in charge, a razor-sharp young businesswoman in specs and sensible shoes. Stephens has done more than just offer a zingy new translation of Brecht’s collaboration with Kurt Weill (and Elisabeth Hauptmann, whose German translation of Gay inspired Brecht); he has radically revamped the play, creating more powerful roles for the female characters and adding a suggestive subtext of shifting sexual identities and desires. Stephens develops Brecht’s hint of eroticism between Macheath, played by Rory Kinnear, and Peter De Jersey’s Tiger Brown, the Chief Inspector, into an overtly homosexual passion that explains their complicity.

This radical new translation of The Threepenny Opera for the National Theatre is a delight. Stephen is both a playwright and a master adapter (most recently of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2012). He reimagines Peachum, played by Nick Holder, as an exuberant cross-dresser. A man of impressive girth, Holder at first coyly hints at something subversive, wearing a tiny frilled apron over his huge suit. As the play progresses, he emerges resplendent in heeled correspondent shoes and a Louise Brooks black bob. Haydn Gwynne as his wife is stick-thin, her magnificently deep voice suggestive of a female-to-male transsexual.

Gay’s original made satirical digs at the Walpole administration. Shortly after The Beggar’s Opera’s opening night in 1728, the leading opposition journal, The Craftsman, feigned ironic disgust at Gay’s alignment of Macheath with Walpole himself:

Nay the very Title of this Piece and the principal Character, which is that of a Highwayman, sufficiently discover the mischievous Design of it; since by this Character every Body will understand One, who makes it his Business arbitrarily to levy and collect Money on the People for his own Use, and of which he always dreads to give an Account. – Is not this squinting with a vengeance, and wounding Persons in Authority through the Sides of a common Malefactor? (The Craftsman, February 1728)

Theatrically, Gay’s piece is astonishingly modern, employing Brechtian alienation two centuries avant la lettre. At the end of the play, seconds before Macheath is due to be executed on stage, two characters, the Beggar and the Player, stop the action and discuss how the play should end. In this piece of metatheatre, the Player argues that to make Macheath die would be ‘manifestly wrong’, turning it into a tragedy. ‘An Opera’, he insists, taking a pot shot at the popularity of the Italian genre, ‘must end happily’. The Beggar agrees the problem can be easily removed, for ‘in this kind of Drama, ‘tis no matter how absurdly things are brought about’. So the rabble are instructed to run around crying ‘A Reprieve!’ and Macheath can be restored to his wives. In Brecht’s update, Brown plays the role of the deus ex machina, entering on horseback to announce the reprieve. In this new production by Stephens, designed by Vicki Mortimer, the deus ex machine becomes the full-blown classical one of opera – Brown descends in a hoop of glitter from on high, jauntily sporting a Wagnerian horned helmet (a nod to Weill’s mockery of high opera).

Using Gay’s original text, Brecht, writing in the traumatised Berlin of the 1920s, substitutes the eighteenth-century popular songs and ballads with Weill’s familiar and still appealing jazz numbers. Weill’s music is, of course, wonderful. This production has a crisp eight-piece band, led by David Shrubsole. The vocals are strong and there’s an added thrill when Polly and Lucy, in their jealous duet, both segue from jazz singing to little bursts of coloratura.

The production is packed with entertainment. The energetic ensemble pieces, including diminutive keystone cops trotting about the stage, give it a general Vaudeville feel. An early scene takes place in a large frame, like an adult-sized Punch and Judy show. Violence is burlesqued – stab victims pull frothy red strings from their supposed wounds. The Hollywood kitsch of Macheath and Polly’s entry, descending on a hoop depicting a waning moon, is comically undermined by Kinnear’s gruntingly dutiful sexual performance.

Time periods shift and shimmer. Sometimes we seem to be in Victorian London. At another, surreal moment, WW1 is talked of and punch bags of meat carcasses suddenly swing from above. There is to be a coronation – a big opportunity for the assembled beggars and pickpockets – but whose, we are not told. 

So beguiling is Holder’s Peachum that Kinnear’s Macheath is sometimes overshadowed. Brecht once imagined there to be two Macheaths, one young, one middle-aged. The latter he saw as ‘a short stocky man of about forty with a head like a radish, a bit bald, but not lacking in dignity’, someone who ‘impresses women less as a handsome man than as a well-situated one’. In this respect Kinnear is ideally cast. There are indeed hints that his appeal to women has more to do with power than sex-appeal, as we see him mechanically zipping up his flies after perfunctory sex with his new bride.

Brecht found Gay’s satirical mixing of high and low a powerful vehicle for his own deliberately disturbing contemporary satire. But these days can any production create something of the shock of Brecht’s challenging modernist play? Today the theatre-going public is more comfortable with experimental, political dramas. So while Stephens’s adaptation and Rufus Norris’s direction offer a tremendously vital, exuberant piece of theatre, the bite of Brecht’s provocative original has all but gone.

The Threepenny Opera is at the National Theatre until October 1st 2016.