Bertolt Brecht was a committed Marxist who found it agreeable to borrow Charles Laughton’s limousine when he went to Hollywood. There he sold the script for one of his works to MGM, that arch purveyor of capitalist entertainment, for $50,000. Ruth Berlau, one of his poor, downtrodden mistresses, had actually written part of that script, and was entitled to 20% of the money, but he never told her about it and kept it all for himself. She was stony broke at the time, and pregnant with his child. A typical leftie all round, really. Hate him or ignore him, you can’t love him.

In 1928, he gave the world The Threepenny Opera, with music by Kurt Weill, an update of John Gay’s much more likeable The Beggar’s Opera. A dark tale of the criminal underworld and the psychopathic villain Macheath, it was supposed to be a satire on the violence and corruption of Weimar Germany. Now the National Theatre, under the wobbly artistic direction of Rufus Norris, has revived it. Reworked by Simon Stephens, it’s set in 1950s London, we are told, although I suspect it’s also supposed to be a portrayal of the violence and corruption of Mr Cameron’s cruel and unequal austerity Britain, so uncomfortably like Weimar Germany. (That was sarcasm, by the way.)

The 1950s setting promises much. The dirty old town is scrubbing up for the Queen’s coronation: “The thieves are on the make, the whores on the pull, the police cutting deals to keep it all out of sight.” So one of the biggest disappointments of the evening is an almost complete absence of any sense of time and place. It never looks or feels remotely like 1950s London, just like the vast cavern of the Olivier theatre, which no doubt is all very Brechtian, but also very boring. Vicki Mortimer has designed a gloomy austerity set to match the tone, with a stepladder and paper walls.

Haydn Gwynne, as Mrs Peachum, climbs up the stepladder at one point in a comical way, with her stalky flamingo legs careening in all directions, as if she has been drawn by Quentin Blake, showing off a pair of black stockings and possibly some Lycra cycling shorts. Other actors come crashing through the paper walls now and again, instead of just entering stage left. Perhaps this ropy old set is a nod to the fact that the National is struggling to get by on the austere £17.6m it gets from Arts Council England each year.

There’s also a disappointing performance from Rory Kinnear, one of our finest comic actors. He can do serious menace, too, as his acclaimed Iago showed. But here, as the arch villain Macheath, “Mack the Knife”, he just settles into a flat, glassy-eyed menace at the start and stays that way throughout. He certainly doesn’t exude sufficient sexual charisma to explain why all the women should fall for him, and, indeed, some of the men.

Yes, we have included here a box-ticking gay subplot involving Macheath and the police chief, Tiger Brown. They enjoy a passionate nostalgic clinch at one point. Apparently, they were soldiers together in Kandahar. Now I hate to be pedantic about this, but the last time the British fought in Kandahar was in 1880, during the Second Afghan War — so this would make Macheath and Tiger Brown in their nineties, at least. Perhaps this is supposed to be Brechtian, too. Perhaps anything implausible or dramatically unsuccessful can be labelled “Brechtian”.

The only character you care about in the slightest is Polly Peachum, played by the wonderful Rosalie Craig. There’s a striking performance, too, from Nick Holder as Peachum, the beggar-master. Mr Holder addressed me on social media not long ago, saying “F***off you irrelevant disconnected prick”, but I do not repine. In fact, it shows courage to insult a critic directly, even if his language is unimaginative. He’s certainly one of the better things here, his sadistic Peachum a huge, gloating transvestite wobble-bottom in heavy make-up and a black bob wig, like some horrendous product of three-way congress between Eddie Izzard, Ronnie Kray and Marjorie the Fat Fighter from Little Britain.

Despite such strikingly grotesque touches, the whole thing remains cold, distant and uninvolving, just as Brecht wanted, and this new version adds only an aimless messiness. Fun fact to finish with, though: did you know that McDonald’s used the Mack the Knife song for an ad campaign in the 1980s, with a deeply creepy moon-man singing “Mac tonight”? Perhaps it didn’t realise the original was about a psycho knife-slasher. Brecht would smile a wintry smile at that, surely — before offering to write McDonald’s some more stuff, for a substantial fee.