The Plays of the Twenties

Abstract

Brecht is generally known nowadays as a writer and producer of rather demanding political theatre. Yet he enjoyed his greatest popular success in 1928 with The Threepenny Opera, a comic ballad opera with unforgettable music by Kurt Weill that has become one of the landmarks of the ‘Roaring’ or ‘Golden’ Twenties. Despite Brecht’s later efforts to turn it into one, The Threepenny Opera, like most of Brecht’s plays of the Twenties, is not a work with a clear social or political message. Yet it does contain a good number of the elements of Epic Theatre. In its origins Epic Theatre was something personal — as the sociologist, Fritz Sternberg, once wrote to Brecht: ‘Epic Theatre, that’s you, my dear Mr Brecht.’1 At the same time it was something that evolved in interaction with the lively culture of the Weimar Republic, the milieu in which Brecht served his literary apprenticeship. Thus Brecht’s work in the 1920s sheds light both on the individual cast of his imagination and on the contemporary influences (if such a word can be applied to an individual in whom the ‘spirit of contradiction’ was so strongly developed) that fed into his conception of Epic Theatre.