Watch Movies2Watch. Ferhan Şensoy says the following about The Threepenny Opera: "When updating Brecht's (The Threepenny Opera) 67 years later, I sometimes approach John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera." For example, in the original work performed 267 years ago, Mack the Knife was a folk hero, while in Brecht's version, he is an ordinary thief. Our own Mahmut is a Kemalist gangster. But we don't stray too far from Brecht; in our play, too, the wrong characters say the right things. And yet The Threepenny Opera is not an opera. It is not a Brecht 'work.' It is an epic farce as close to Brecht's Kel Hasan Efendi as it is to his own work."