Brecht's Play Research Articles

The chimerical world in Bertolt Brecht's drama "The Vision of Simona Mashar" and in Leon Feuchtwanger's novel "Simon"

The article analyzes the creation of a "chimerical" world in Bertolt Brecht'sdrama "The Vision of Simon Mashar" and Leon Feuchtwanger's novel "Simon"."Irrational", "improbable", "fictional", "unusual" – there are characteristics thatunderlie the concept of "chimerical".
 Extraordinary metamorphoses with characters who become in a dreamacquire the features of historical characters, who are promised to act this wayand not otherwise, a shift in time and space - the main characteristics of21"chimerical" prose or drama. Bertolt Brecht's play „The Vision of SimoneMashar”and Leon Feithwanger’s novel “Simon” is the story of Jeanne d’Arc, whoprompted the protagonist Simone to perform feats in the name of her nativeFrance, against the German invaders. Brecht created his play in direct contactwith Feuchtwanger, but as a result the authors published two different worksthat have different conceptual meanings, but the main idea of the both works is- the struggle of the French against the German occupiers. The motif of a book andthe motif of a dream are of great importance in two works, which help to connectthe fictional and the real chronotope. It is from the book that Simon learns thestory of Jeanne d’Arc. In the dream, Simon imitates the features of Jeanne d'Arcand fights. Like Jeanne d'Arc, Simon is executed by her compatriots. The workswere written during the Second World War, so the great importance is played byhistorical studies- the idea and prerequisites for the creation of the work. It isresearched how chimericaly is realized in epic drama and realistic psychologicalnovel, and how it is related to the "V-effect" in Brecht's dramas.

«ТУРАНДОТ» Б. БРЕХТА НА СЦЕНЕ ТЕАТРА НА ТАГАНКЕ: ИСТОРИЯ СОЗДАНИЯ И МУЗЫКАЛЬНОЕ ОФОРМЛЕНИЕ А. ШНИТКЕ

The article presents the history of the creation of "Turandot" based on the play by B. Brecht at the Taganka Theater, directed by Yu. Lyubimov. A significant place as a prototype for Yu. Lyubimov's production is devoted to the unfinished play by the German playwright "Turandot, or the Congress of Whitewashers", work on which was interrupted for many years and resumed only in the early 50s. It is emphasized that in the Taganka Theater, the main form of performance was a musical spectacle with simple vocal and instrumental episodes. The paper analyzes ten zongs for male voice by A. Schnittke, created for the play "Turandot" to poems by B. Slutsky and A. Voznesensky and reveals their genre basis and musical expressive means. The suite principle of alternating zongs in the performance is combined with the form of the background, in which signs of cyclicity appear. It is noted that zongs embedded into the main fabric of the play added the necessary subtext and thus brought Brecht's play closer to the Soviet reality of the late 70s.

Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960 by Ela Gezen

Reviewed by: Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960 by Ela Gezen Britta Kallin Ela Gezen. Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960. Camden House, 2018. 159 pp. Cloth, $85.00. This cohesive, well-written, and overdue analysis examines the interconnections and intersections of Brecht's political aesthetics, Turkish theater, and Turkish-German literature. Ela Gezen's methodological approach builds on intersectional scholarship in German studies such as Leslie Adelson's "Turkish turn" in German literature, B. Venkat Mani's "cos-mopolitical claims," and Fatima El-Tayeb's investigation into Germany's racist history that created "non-Germans/ Undeutsche" The first chapter covers the period after the military coup in Turkey in 1960 and explores how Turkish intellectuals were drawn to Brecht's approach to use theater as a political tool that supports working-class efforts to limit capitalist exploitation. The first translation of Brecht's works into Turkish was published in 1956. In 1964 the first theater department was established at a Turkish university. In the same year, the staging of Brecht's play The Good Person of Szechwan in a theater in Istanbul, Dram Tiyatro, was interrupted by protests. This was called the "Brecht Incident" and led to an investigation into the play's communist message. During that time Turkish theater practitioners started referring to plays as "ex-periments" and troupes as "ensembles" to underline the experimental aspects of theater. Brecht's epic theater and Verfremdung became part of many Turkish plays, such as Haldun Taner's The Ballad of Ali of Keshan. Taner uses culture as a weapon to counteract suppressive governmental strategies. In the 1960s, international theater festivals such as the one in Erlangen, Germany, allowed Turkish student groups to perform, interact, and exchange ideas about Brecht's aesthetics. This exchange was mediated through new Brecht translations and synopses of plays in Turkish, English, and German that were available at the festivals. In the second chapter, Gezen explores the writings and adaptations [End Page 141] of Brecht's works by Aras Ören, who has made use of Brecht's dialectical approach to support Turkish guest workers in Germany by providing them agency and opening up spaces for a political education for Turks and Germans who provide manual labor. Ören made a critical intervention into the reception of Brecht's oeuvre by changing some aspects to fit the needs of the new situation of Turkish workers in Germany. Similarly, other artists such as Wolf Biermann changed the official Brecht reception accepted by the East German government to an approach that was critical of the dictatorial aspects of that government. In the third and last chapter, Gezen examines Brecht's influence on some of Emine Sevgi Özdamar's novels. Özdamar came to Germany to work at the Volksbühne as a theater practitioner. She lived in West Berlin, worked in East Berlin, and crossed the German-German border on a daily basis. (Because of her Turkish passport, she had no problem crossing the border.) Özdamar compares Brecht's literary reaction to fascism with her own writings against suppressive political developments in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s. Gezen's book also includes a number of rare photos of Ören and Özdamar as actors in Brecht's plays. Gezen makes a particularly interesting connection between Brecht's montage strategies of including music and visuals and Özdamar's novels. Özdamar makes use of montage when the narrator changes the temporality of the plot and superimposes images from her past in Istanbul onto her life in East and West Berlin. The often-used Brechtian theatrical technique of the revolving stage is mirrored in Özdamar's text when thought processes go in circles rather than following a linear path. Even though Gezen does not emphasize her feminist perspective, she draws on feminist scholarship such as Claudia Breger's work on montage, Monika Shafi's view of the female narrator, Yasemin Yildiz's argument about "translational exchange," and Sonja Klocke's research on the revolving stage. Gezen correctly points to connections between her research and that of Turkish-German scholarship on post-Wall literature, in particular the post-migrant theater of...

Humour and the Representation of Fascism in Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg: Adorno contra Brecht and Hanns Eisler

Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler's Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg occupies a key but under-recognized place in debates about humour in anti-fascist art in the late 1950s and early 1960s – debates largely dominated by Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Brecht's satirical plays on the Third Reich. In this article Anna Papaeti examines the artistic strategies and reception history of Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg in the context of such debates. Focusing in particular on Eisler's musical additions for the parodic ‘higher regions’ interludes, as well as on the controversies sparked by the 1959 West German premiere, she analyzes the play's role in stimulating key debates, showing how Brecht's play and Eisler's music attain a more complex and defensible position of resistance to fascism than was allowed in Adorno's critique. Anna Papaeti has a doctorate from King's College London, has worked at the Royal Opera House, London, and as Associate Dramaturg at the Greek National Opera, Athens. Her postdoctoral research includes a DAAD fellowship on Hanns Eisler (Universität der Künste, Berlin, 2010) and a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (University of Göttingen, 2011–14) on the use of music by the Greek military junta. She has previously published in such journals as Opera Quarterly, Music and Politics, and The World of Music, and in edited scholarly volumes.

Apontamentos sobre a recepção de Bertolt Brecht no Brasil via Anatol Rosenfeld

One of the most important chapters in the reception of German theater in Brazil began in 1958 with the presentation of Berthold Brecht's play The Good Woman of Setsuan. The subsequent performance of many of his works brought up new dramaturgic and theoretical questions in a context that was open to aesthetic experimentation and marked by a dialectic between the theater and the turbulent social context of the period. Groups such as Arena, Oficina, and CPC discussed, updated and articulated Brecht's work through their experimentation. Since this reception in Brazil, both in the late 1950s and today, is based on several different theoretical and critical references, it would seem well to go back to Anatol Rosenfeld's critique of Brecht. From his broad knowledge of aesthetic theater, epic theater theory, Brazilian theater and Brecht's work, Rosenfeld holds an important place in the debates on Brecht's works and Brecht's influence on Brazilian theater. In this article we take up several phases in Rosenfeld's work, which is theoretical as well as historical and critical. His contributions are considered among the most lucid and updated studies on Brecht and the Brazilian theater.

Wole Soyinka: Dance Master of Appetite

Wole Soyinka is a master of the chameleon. He has shifted shapes so often from poetry to drama to fiction, and from comedy to tragedy and back again, that it is no wonder he has confused and sometimes upset critics and readers. His early work was at times obscure and abstract, but if there is one theme that connects Iiis comedies to Iiis tragedies , it would certainly deal with the enormity and variety of human appetite. Whether it be for power, sex, money, or martyrdom, overwhelming appetite has been one of the constants of Iiis work. We can study its evolution in four of Iiis early plays: two satires-Opera Wonvosi and Kongi Is Han'est, and two tragedies-The Bacchae of Euripides and Death and the King s Horseman.Kongi s Han'est and Opera Wonvosi are both satires of political tyranny. appetite in play is for absolute power in the hands of dictators like those who have dominated so much of post-colonial African history. two tragedies also deal with these appetites for power and control as well as their opposities: the appetites for pleasure, release, sex, and wild ecstasy.Kongi 's Han'est (1065) presents us with a classic parody of an African dictator. Kongi assigns Iiis Aweri lackeys to write Iiis books for him so that he may appear a man of learning and wisdom. His appetite for grandeur is so messianic he wants to renumber the calendar for himself, so that the past will be measured in years B.K.H. (Before Kongi's Harvest). He poses for a photographer in savior-like postires that could be labeled The Face of Benevolence... the Giver of Life (WS 93) Though Iiis enemies try to assassinate him, Kongi survives their attack and maintains Iiis power. final grim reality is that the tyrant still rules and Iiis enemies, who represent the healthy appetites of love and tradition, are killed or must flee for their lives. As in much of recent African history, the excessive appetite for power rules the day.Soyinka 's appetite for satire also leads him to write Opera Wonyosi, Iiis interpretation of a modern European classic: Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928). Brecht's play was already an adaptation of Iiis original source, John Gay's Beggars Opera (1728). Both Gay and Brecht were out to criticize political corruption in their own societies: 18th century Britain and early 20th century Germany. two works satirize the human appetites for money, love, and power. In both the main characters are thieves, prostitutes, and hustlers: figures from the underworlds of London and Berlin. In other words, they provide a perfect model for Wole Soyinka.Soyinka keeps Brecht's plot intact but moves it to contemporary West Africa, retelling the story of Mack the Knife, Iiis rival the King of Beggars- called Chief Anikura and Iiis wife De Madam, and Mack's troubles in love with Polly, Lucy, Jenny and other ladies of the night. He even keeps some of Kurt Weill's famous songs, especially the Ballad of Mack the Knife, for which he writes Iiis own lyrics alluding to examples of Nigerian corruption like the marble monopoly at Igbeti. Instead of the street singer, Soyinka updates that role to a hip Dee-Jay. His main addition to Brecht's play is its setting in the neighboring Central African Republic during the coronation of His Imperial Diminuative Emperor Bokassa I. Both Gay and Brecht made use of coronation settings which usually provided major business for thieves and beggars. Gay used the coronation of King George II in 1727 and Brecht used the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837. But Soyinka actually introduces Emperor Bokassa as one of Iiis major characters. Folksy Boksy as the Dee-Jay calls him. is simply too good a target for satire. His first scene is a masterful comic riff on the blustering tyrant. Emperor Boky compares himself to Napoleon who also started out as a commoner and was not even a real Frenchman coming from Corsica. Boky is a francophonie African, but like Napoleon he is a powerful leader who glorifies the traditions of the French Revolution, at least in Iiis own mind. …

Capitalism and Crime: Brechtian Economies in The Threepenny Opera and Love, Crime and Johannesburg1

In 1999, nine years after Nelson Mandela's release, the Johannesburg-based, formerly Marxist Junction Avenue Theatre Company premiered its first post-apartheid play, Love, Crime and Johannesburg – a rewriting of Brecht's Threepenny Opera. This article asks to what use the South African group puts Brecht's play and theatrical method, in the postcolonial and neo-liberal moment of the 1990s and 2000s. What does the play suggest about historical and contemporary relations between crime and capitalism, crime and apartheid, and capitalism and apartheid? Does it seek to emancipate itself from the Marxian view that capitalism and crime are aspects of one and the same condition that can be overcome only as a whole? What remains of the Brechtian conviction that theatre can be realistic only to the extent that it contributes practically to solving the problems it represents? I argue that the play exposes the discourse of “lawlessness” that has replaced “reconciliation” as the near-universal currency for articulating South Africa's post-liberation predicament. The play also foregrounds the accelerating displacement of the biogeography of apartheid by the post-urban topography of spectacular capitalism. Both tendencies efface history, concealing structures of domination that continue to shape the city and the country. While the play does not “estrange” or explain these structures, it points to a global economic dispensation that prevents the twin legacies of imperialism and apartheid from being redressed. In doing so, it may also accentuate its own incapacity to envision itself as part of a solution to the problem it analyses.

Capitalism and Crime: Brechtian Economies in The Threepenny Opera and Love, Crime and Johannesburg

In 1999, nine years after Nelson Mandela's release, the Johannesburg-based, formerly Marxist Junction Avenue Theatre Company premiered its first post-apartheid play, Love, Crime and Johannesburg - a rewriting of Brecht's Threepenny Opera . This article asks to what use the South African group puts Brecht's play and theatrical method, in the postcolonial and neo-liberal moment of the 1990s and 2000s. What does the play suggest about historical and contemporary relations between crime and capitalism, crime and apartheid, and capitalism and apartheid? Does it seek to emancipate itself from the Marxian view that capitalismand crime are aspects of one and the same condition that can be overcome only as a whole? What remains of the Brechtian conviction that theatre can be realistic only to the extent that it contributes practically to solving the problems it represents? I argue that the play exposes the discourse of "lawlessness" that has replaced "reconciliation" as the near-universal currency for articulating South Africa's post-liberation predicament. The play also foregrounds the accelerating displacement of the biogeography of apartheid by the post-urban topography of spectacular capitalism. Both tendencies efface history, concealing structures of domination that continue to shape the city and the country. While the play does not "estrange" or explain these structures, it points to a global economic dispensation that prevents the twin legacies of imperialism and apartheid from being redressed. In doing so, it may also accentuate its own incapacity to envision itself as part of a solution to the problem it analyses.

Long Day's Journey Into Brecht: The Ambivalent Politics of The Lives of Others

Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others has been widely praised as the first German film to confront the horrors of the East German communist regime. But the film's politics may be ambiguous. As critical as it is of East Germany, it does not offer a ringing endorsement of West Germany. For example, the film's playwright-hero seems to have artistic problems in the West, just as he did in the East. The film's equivocal attitude toward communism is epitomized by its apparently positive view of the Marxist author Bertolt Brecht. This essay compares The Lives of Others with Brecht's play The Good Person of Szechwan in an effort to understand Donnersmarck's attitude toward his East German predecessor and what it means for his larger view of communism and its relation to art.

A Man's a Man , but What about Woman?: Widow Leocadia Begbick in Bertolt Brecht's Play (1926-2006)

This essay argues that Bertolt Brecht's play, A Man's a Man (Mann ist Mann) , is not merely about men, as its title suggests. Indeed, the play seems to tell the story of Galy Gay, a civilian who assumes the name and identity of another soldier. However, canteen owner widow Leocadia Begbick, who follows the British Army in India, not only drives the action of the play forward, but also analyzes the play's events as the narrator. Until it attracted the interest of feminist critics in the 1980s, her character had been almost ignored. Yet the gender critique put forward by Brecht persists through changing political circumstances and his deliberate adjustments to them in different versions of the play. Given the fundamental alterations that he made to the play without modifying Begbick's character, feminist inquiries might do well to examine Begbick's role in his texts, and particularly in contemporary interpretations. (MSE)

Rewriting, Violence, and Theater: Bertolt Brecht's The Measures Taken and Heiner Müller's Mauser

Much has been written about Bertolt Brecht's extraordinary influence on contemporary theater. This tendency is perhaps best seen in the words ofKenneth Tynan who stated, in 1956: in a generation the world discovers a new way oftelling a story. This generation's pathfinder is Bertolt Brecht, both as a playwright and as a director (qtd. in RooseEvans 68). Brecht's newness—his pathfinding theories of acting and production—has influenced generations in Western Europe, the United States, and the former Eastern Bloc countries. Yet, to use him as a barometer, or as an aesthetic gauge tojudge the relevance and contemporaneity ofa dramatic work oftenfalls short ofits mark. Tfone makes the yardstick for what literature can accomplish today, writes Peter Burger in Theory ofthe Avant-Garde, Brecht himselfcan no longer be judged and the question whether the solution he found for certain problems is tied to the period ofits creation or not can no longer be asked (88). Burger sees that Brecht's works cannot be separated from history. Once they are removed from their ideological and historical contexts, his influential techniques and theories become mere influences or modes of style and imitation within theatrical convention, not avant-garde techniques which aim to undermine traditional experiences ofthe theater.1 There is another way to assess Brecht's work. For critic Martin EssHn, What distinguishes from his contemporaries [. . .] is the fact thathe was able to find a way out ofthe dead end of destructiveness for its own sake (558). In other words, Brecht's plays themselves are serious reflections that are resistant to nihilism. But what does this mean in the realm of contemporary theater? How can contemporary playwrights use without vitiating his project? Critics like Linda Hutcheon suggestthat earlier works can be reinvigorated parodically by contemporaryartists who use them as tools to critique present situations (57). In this critical vein, Heiner Muller uses Bertolt Brecht's play Die Masnahme (TheMeasures Taken) (1930) as the basis forhis playMauser (1970).2 Muller's effective re-writing of Brecht's play injects historical consciousness into perceptions ofthe course ofsocialist and communist revolution in the Eastern Bloc, which changed dramatically between the utopianism ofthe late-1920s and the uncertainty ofthe postwar period. This essay undertakes a comparative reading and analysis ofthe ways in which and Muller grapple with questions ofviolence, particularly when and where it relates to the revolutionary process. In an essay entitled Producing Revolution: Heiner Muller's Mauser as Learning

Galileo: An Experiment in Interdisciplinary Education

GALILEO was a team-taught course required of all ninth grade students at Francis Parker, a progressive, middle-class, urban school. The content of the course included Galileo's writings, biographical and historical studies, and Brecht's play Galileo. The planning and execution of the course attempted to transcend fractious controversy over common courses by asking the entire faculty to sponsor and evaluate the program. The course presented an opportunity for the faculty to engage in an ongoing experiment in cooperative development of curriculum. Instead of an authoritarian concern to make students master basic skills, GALILEO invoked the approach of a liberal education: we imparted skills of making other selves, making connections, making judgments, and making ourselves in the recovery of one man's life, works, and character. The principal theme of the course was the relationship between observation and inference. Whether observing the night sky with the naked eye or the moon with a telescope assembled in class, students had to pay close attention to details; whether considering the apparently spherical shape of the jagged moon or the retrograde motion of an outer planet, students had to distinguish what Galileo observed from what he inferred about those details. The course became a canvas for the study of authority. Galileo's own conflicts with the Church and Brecht's dramatization of the conflict between scientist and state delineated moral and political problems of authority. GALILEO explored the intellectual problems of authority in adjusting the relative importance of tradition and method. In his desire to persuade the truth of the new cosmology, Galileo argued that theology regulates but does not constitute the sciences. Although Galileo's conception of relative motion does not immediately appeal to common sense, thought can reshape experience through the authority of experiment. GALILEO contributed to interdisciplinary education in four ways: it created a pattern of shared design, teaching, and evaluation for teachers; it developed an active conjunction of disciplines for the development of skills in its students; it presented a subject that richly interweaves the sciences and the humanities; and it stimulated assessment of the present and future needs of education.

An Australian Hero

This is a type of fairy tale, a very modern one to be sure, which engages with a point of view laid out by Walter Benjamin fifty years ago concerning the function of the fairy tale in combating the forces of mythology. In his essay on 'The Storyteller', Benjamin says that the fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest. In the figure of the fool, the tale shows us how mankind can act dumb before the myth, and the wisest thing it teaches is to meet the forces of the mythical world with courage, high spirits, and cunning the characteristics, by and large, that Benjamin singled out as making up the hero of a Brecht play.' Think of Mother Courage and of Galy Gay, let alone of the Good Soldier Schweik of whom Brecht was so fond. Of course, these are hardly heroes in either the classical or the modern sense, but then maybe our sense of 'tragedy' with which the hero is so intertwined gives us too mythic a sense of evil which it is nowadays the task of the ordinary person the Brechtian 'hero' to suffer as an everyday occurrence. The hero I want to tell you about is an Australian man, old, rather deaf and with poor eyesight, who came from the bush and served as a horseman and then in the trenches with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the ANZACS, in WW 1. The tale he tells is worth retelling, I think, because of what it may teach us about ways to deflate the heroism that is used by the state to invigorate if not invent traditions that make for a culture of nationalism a culture, of course, that once set, becomes a powerful tool in the arsenal of social control, used not only by the state but also one which we non-heroes practice daily over ourselves too. And here it needs emphasizing how Australian nationalism is fatefully invested in the mythology of war, notably the sacrifice and defeat of the Gallipoli campaign in the Middle East in World War 1. In this society where there exists little by the way of God, virtually no enlivening of private or public life by ritual, no spirits of fairies or hobgoblins, no Day of

Directing in Underdeveloped California: the Watsonville Experience

Workers in ‘conscientization’ through theatre in the so-called underdeveloped countries tend to assume that this form of theatre work has a potential unique to such circumstances. R. G. Davis, who was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the ‘sixties, argues that the poorer sections of the richest nation in the world have no less been deprived of their cultural roots, and here describes his experiences when he was asked to direct a play dramatizing a workplace incident in the cannery town of Watsonville, northern California, when a Mexican worker was appealing for reinstatement against unfair dismissal. A regular contributor to the former Theatre Quarterly, most recently in TQ 40 (1981) on his productions of Dario Forin the USA, R. G. Davis's own version of We Won't Pay, We Won't Pay, was published last year by Samuel French, and he has recently directed a Native American play in San Jose, followed by a Brecht play in Australia.