The authors transplanted Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” to the lawless Petrograd of the nineteen-twenties and rhymed Mack the Knife with the bandit Lyonka Panteleev. The twenties here, though, are less history than Soviet utopia.

As befits a musical, a jazz band and a string orchestra play live. The link to the present is held by Ivan Kushnir’s score and by surprisingly modern arrangements of songs from the early twentieth century.

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“This play is about love and compromises, it is about the end of hope. Deeper and deeper we are descending into that swamp of satiation, where hopes become a routine. Why does it happen this way? Because you allow compromises. You ease somewhere and think that it’s okay. You paint your emptiness with nice colours, you garnish it with nice things and think that it will go well this way. This is compromise. Life is like a text editor. It edits you all the time and suggests changing your words. To live your life means to switch off this automatic word replacement function and find your mistakes on your own.” (Interview with Maxim Didenko and Nikolay Dreiden).