In 1982, the BBC screened a production of Bertolt Brecht's
Baal, directed by Alan Clarke and starring David Bowie. It is
very hard to find, but eventually everything crops up somewhere; below is
a clip of the first ten minutes of the program. Sound and picture quality
are those of a well-worn videotape. It's an intriguing clip
nonetheless. More about Baalhere.
If only there were a clip from Volker Schlöndorff's 1970
television version with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (as Baal), Margarethe von
Trotta and Hanna Schygulla, well ... now that would be a Happy New Year
indeed!
In today's Guardian, Michael Billington offers an apologia for
his use of the epithet "Brechtian" in describing a new London revival of
Annie Get Your Gun:
"Brechtian" these days has come to mean "slow, ponderous,
didactic" ...
Intriguingly, Deborah Warner's current Mother
Courage at the National is the very opposite of what we normally
mean
by "Brechtian": it's light, nimble-footed with a piratical
performance from Fiona Shaw and a Duke Special score in which Weimar meets
soft rock. But Brecht himself is partly to blame for the way he is often
done: he left behind a mountain of "model-books" about his
productions which, slavishly followed, lead to leaden revivals. Throw away
the rule-books and the plays live again.
And, although Brecht himself once said his work's future
depended on communism's survival, I suspect he's due for
re-appraisal. With capitalism going through one of its cyclical
crises, his plays have acquired renewed topicality.
Billington blames Brecht ("partly") for the often sluggish productions
that Brecht may receive in London, but of course, partly Brecht is not to
blame. Among Brecht's very last writings was a note to his Berliner
Ensemble company on the eve of their first trip to London (with,
speaking
of irony, Mother Courage), encouraging the players to make their
playing "quick, light, and strong," a result, he said, of "quick
thinking." While it's true that those modelbooks may have resulted in
moth-eaten, languorous productions for which the Berliner
Ensemble was notorious in the 1960s and 1970s (and even Brecht scholar
John Willett has left highly critical notes on Brecht's own productions
in his excellent book Brecht in Context), one can't blame Brecht
for Elisabeth Hauptmann or Helene Weigel's dismissal of Brecht's own
advice.
Though here in the U.S. (as, apparently, in England) it's Mother
Courage that gets on the
boards most often, the re-appraisal is already underway, and
intriguingly it's the earlier, more politically astute work into which new
life is being poured. In the past few seasons, New York has seen an
imaginative revival of the 1926 Man Is Man and a fine, rare staging of the
1932 St. Joan of the Stockyards. Productions by
small companies, working in studios and basements instead of the
mainstages of institutional theatres, but imaginative and
fine nonetheless. One day American
artistic directors may discover that Brecht's work consists of far more
than Mother Courage and The Threepenny Opera; it would
be to their, and our, advantage to re-examine a dramatist who in many
ways was the 20th century Shakespeare.
The Bertolt Brecht revival, which I wrote about last December for the
Guardian (UK), continues apace. London is now
seeing the premiere of Brecht's final play, Turandot, at the Hampstead Theatre through 4
October. The play's translator, Edward Kemp, writes in today's Guardian:
Turandot was first conceived as a companion piece to
Galileo, which Brecht wrote in the late 1930s, and subsequently
revised. "Having shown the dawn of reason," Brecht explained in a 1953
notebook, "I became eager to depict its twilight." In Turandot,
ideas and opinions become a commodity, marketable like any other; in one
scene, they are sold like sex down a darkened alley. ... [The] incomplete
[play] left behind at Brecht's death is a remarkable confection: an epic
but very unalienating satire over which the ghosts of Aristophanes,
Moliére, Hitler, Marx, Mao and McCarthy hover.
The plot of In the Jungle of Cities, too, turned on Shlink's
attempt to purchase the opinion of librarian George Garga, ending in
bloody and devastating disaster. Brecht would return to the issue again
and again, in Galileo depicting the purchase – with threats of
torture – of Galileo's silence.
In the body of his essay, Kemp discusses the ideological background of
the play and Brecht's increasingly ambivalent attitude towards Soviet
Communism in the post-war era. A good piece, and my London readers
may wish to drop by the Hempstead Theatre in the next few weeks to see
what Brecht's "most out-and-out comedy" (an arguable
characterisation, given Puntila and the second half of Caucasian
Chalk Circle) looks like.
Speaking of Galileo, there's a new series of Brecht plays from
Penguin Classics returning to print the fine Willett/Manheim
edition, which has been spread across four or five publishing houses since
its inception at Random House in 1971. So far, The Good Person of
Szechwan, The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage and Her
Children have appeared; the latest is Life of Galileo,
published earlier this year with a cheerful foreword by Richard
Foreman. I also wrote about the current state of Brecht in English
translation here.
