A good night out over the weekend at The Threepenny Opera, Toi Whakaari’s graduating show this year. A show well done, some voicing wobbles in that cavernous space, to one side. It got me thinking, afterwards, though, about the play’s place in the canon now. What, in the era of Trump and the lumpenbourgeoisie around him, does Brecht have to say here? We’re in an age with perhaps an insufficient amount of hypocrisy. Look at it all, the script insists, and, underneath the fine labels and social niceties, it’s just power, violence, thuggery, sexual exploitation. Yes, it’s easy enough to imagine Trump, or JD Vance, or Pete Hegseth, responding: yes, we love it. This is exactly how things are.