Much of Bertolt Brecht's material is too highbrow for most people's liking, but The Threepenny Opera manages to be both satirical and earthy. Opening with the jaunty tune Mack the Knife, the 1928 musical - a reworking of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera of two centuries earlier - tells the tale of Soho's seedy underclass, who fear the blade-wielding, promiscuous and razor-witted Macheath, and his gang of ruffians. The rule of law rarely troubles Macheath, as police chief Tiger Brown - a former army comrade - is in his pocket.

This Musicals of Oxford production, featuring some decidedly coarse dialogue by Robert David MacDonald and equally pithy lyrics by Jeremy Sams, was heavily indebted to the version hammered out by the Donmar Warehouse in the 1990s, and proved a curate's egg. It wasn't easy to reconcile the Victorian-style presentation with the sporadic contemporary references to mobile phones, Mercedes and British troops lynching 'darkies' in Basra, while the brandishing of a red flag, in a week in which the bloody crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising was being remembered with sorrow in some quarters, suggested that Brecht's socialist call to arms dates from a bygone age.

Technically, it was occasionally shaky on the opening night, with the cast's microphones turned up rather clumsily (and unnecessarily, for none of the singers lacked gusto) at the start of every song, and the chereography appearing ragged in the early numbers, as umbrellas were twirled and limbs splayed without a great deal of co-ordination. Yet the performances were spirited, and the singing at times excellent - the highlight being, perhaps, the duet between love rivals Polly (Maria Trkulja) and Lucy (Laura Hanna). Owen Findlay was charmingly villainous as the dapper Macheath, while Matthew Jones and Delyth Jewell, as the amusing Mr and Mrs Peachum, won the loudest applause and several whoops as the cast trooped on stage for the encore.