BERTOLD
BRECHT
According
to Lotte Lenya, longtime leading lady and intermittent wife of collaborator
Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht was a brilliant and shameless appropriator of
other writers’ material. Whether a brilliant reinterpreter or shrewd plagiarizer
-- the critics have been divided -- there's been no debate about Brecht's
towering influence on twentieth-century drama.His early plays, “Baal” (1918) and “Drums in the Night” (1919), are tinged with mute, expressionistic anarchy and a cynical despair over society's repression of the human soul. Brecht's theatrical vision turned didactic in the mid-1920s with his immersion in Marxism and his development of a social conscience. While working with director Erwin Piscator and deviant composer Kurt Weill, Brecht's anti-militarism and diffuse concern with working-class exploitation began to jell. Radical staging, exotic locales, and scathing satire of the modern middle class became the signature of Brecht’s “epic” theater, a genre marked by an overt theatricality that distances or alienates the audience from identification with plots and characters.
Brecht used this style as a tool for his politics; he felt theater was a means to confront social problems, not escape them. Brecht fumed against the "complete passivity" and "hypnotized effect" of conventional, Aristotelian theater, which demands the synchronicity of spectators’ emotions with those of their staged doppelgangers. Brecht wanted to inspire his audience to translate its theatrical catharsis into unleashed social action outside the theater. In a not-so-subtle caricature of the current bourgeois values, Brecht adapted John Gay's eighteenth-century parody “The Beggar's Opera” to reflect nineteenth-century lower-class London, where "beggars are begging, thieves thieving, whores whoring.” Brecht reached the zenith of his creativity in exile from Nazi Germany during his wanderings throughout unoccupied Europe. From 1933 on, Brecht's sprawling, theatrical canvases teem with life, color, and exoticism. For example, “Mother Courage and her Children” (1938) suffer though the Thirty Years' War, while the prostitute-heroine in “The Good Woman of Setzuan” (1942) has a passel of irate ancestral gods and a host of greedy villagers with whom she must contend.
These critically acknowledged masterpieces cemented Brecht's reputation as a theatrical genius. All of these works convey Brecht's fascination with Asian theater by their use of symbolic props, such as a board placed across two chairs to suggest a bridge. These devices allowed Brecht to tell a compelling story while avoiding the hypnotic "trap" of realism.
Though Brecht's output decreased after the war years, his reputation continued to soar internationally. His Berliner Ensemble, established in 1949, won first prize in the 1954 World Theater Festival in Paris. From that point on, it was recognized as one of the world's finest acting companies and was exalted to near-mythic proportions. By the time of Brecht's death in 1956, “epic” theater and its theories had vaulted to the forefront of world drama.
