Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera is regularly revived worldwide because of Kurt Weill’s mordant, haunting score. Five years after its hugely successful Berlin premiere in 1929 it was officially denounced by the Nazis as a prime example of Degenerate Art. It is fiendishly difficult to recreate the punch it once had. The only time it has really worked in Britain was when The Berliner Ensemble came to The Old Vic in 1965 with Wolf Kaiser, the definitive “Mack the Knife”. Rufus Norris’s extraordinary, ramshackle production at National Theatre is notable for its obscene language. The translator and adapter is Simon Stephens. Rory Kinnear is Mack, the notorious robber and womaniser, hand in glove with the chief of police. There are strong performances by Nick Holder as a cross-dressing Peachum in high heels and Louise Brooke wig and by Haydn Gwynne as his wife. He looks like a caricature out of George Grosz; she looks like a caricature out of Otto Dix. Rosalie Craig (as Polly, who marries Mack and has two of the best songs) gets the loudest applause. Drew McOnie’s Jekyll & Hyde at The Old Vic – his first full-length two-act dance-drama – will appeal to a Matthew Bourne audience. The most famous of all double acts is one person. Here he is played by two clever dancers, Daniel Collins and Tim Hodges. The Gothic horror is taken out of the foggy nocturnal lamp-lit Victorian era and relocated to the 1950s. The narrative is totally coherent. The production is smooth and slick. The transformation from Jekyll to Hyde is always astutely managed. Grant Olding’s music, which emphasises the split personality, is very danceable. Jekyll, cast as a geeky botanist, who falls in love with a nice girl (Rachel Muldoon) gets an upbeat, jazzy score, such as you might find in an old MGM musical. Hyde gets something more bluesy and sinister. It’s all great fun and deserves a long shelf life Richard Madden and Lily James in Romeo and Juliet at Garrick Theatre are not totally at ease with Shakespeare’s verse and much of what they say is just a lot of words. There is no tragedy. Derek Jacobi is unexpectedly cast as Mercutio. What, you may ask, is a louche, sashaying 77-year-old doing hanging out with Verona’s youth? The Merchants of Bollywood at Peacock Theatre is aimed at Asian families who will go for the spectacle and the energy. Bollywood dancing is all about energy. There is no respite for the dancers when they are off-stage; they constantly have to change their costumes at speed. The colourful costumes (1,200 of them plus jewellery) are the spectacle. The fusion of folk, classical, modern, Western and Indian dance forms makes for a high-spirited finale. Berlin’s Schaubühne is touring Forbidden Zone, a feminist perspective on war, science and chemical weapons. Audiences will come out of the theatre talking about Katie Mitchell’s characteristic and upstaging multimedia production rather than about the moral responsibilities of scientists in wartime. “If you want a picture of the future,” said George Orwell, “imagine a boot on a human face – forever.” But Jonathan Watkins’s touring version of 1984 for Northern Ballet fails to capture the nightmarish horror of a totalitarian state exercising its brutal authority.