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Brecht Collected Plays #1
Collected Plays 1: Baal / Drums in the Night / In the Jungle of Cities / The Life of Edward II of England / 5 One-act Plays
Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.
Volume One of Brecht's Collected Plays contains Brecht's first performed stage works. Baal is inspired by Brecht's student life in Augsburg and follows the life of a young poet on the rocky road to inspiration; Drums in the Night was written in response to Brecht's experience as a medical orderly in the aftermath of the First World War; and In the Jungle of Cities, set in Chicago, covers the downfall of a family that has moved from the prairies to the jungle of the big city - award-winning in its day, it was described by a leading German daily as the play that 'has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision'.
This volume also includes The Life of Edward II of England, a ballad-like adaptation of Marlowe's original, and five one-act plays The Beggar or the Dead Dog, Driving Out The Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch and A Respectable Wedding in which the bourgeois proceedings take a hilarious turn for the unseemly.
The translators are Jean Benedetti, Eva Geiser and Ernest Borneman, Richard Grünberger, Michael Hamburger, Gerhard Nellhaus, Peter Tegel and John Willett. The translations are ideal for both study and performance. The volume is accompanied by a full introduction and notes by the series editor John Willett and includes Brecht's own notes and relevant texts as well as all the important textual variants.
Volume One of Brecht's Collected Plays contains Brecht's first performed stage works. Baal is inspired by Brecht's student life in Augsburg and follows the life of a young poet on the rocky road to inspiration; Drums in the Night was written in response to Brecht's experience as a medical orderly in the aftermath of the First World War; and In the Jungle of Cities, set in Chicago, covers the downfall of a family that has moved from the prairies to the jungle of the big city - award-winning in its day, it was described by a leading German daily as the play that 'has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision'.
This volume also includes The Life of Edward II of England, a ballad-like adaptation of Marlowe's original, and five one-act plays The Beggar or the Dead Dog, Driving Out The Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch and A Respectable Wedding in which the bourgeois proceedings take a hilarious turn for the unseemly.
The translators are Jean Benedetti, Eva Geiser and Ernest Borneman, Richard Grünberger, Michael Hamburger, Gerhard Nellhaus, Peter Tegel and John Willett. The translations are ideal for both study and performance. The volume is accompanied by a full introduction and notes by the series editor John Willett and includes Brecht's own notes and relevant texts as well as all the important textual variants.
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
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About the author
Bertolt Brecht
1,606 books1,929 followersEugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. A seminal theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble—the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene Weigel—with its internationally acclaimed productions.
From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama (which constitutes that medium's rendering of 'autonomization' or the 'non-organic work of art'—related in kind to the strategy of divergent chapters in Joyce's novel Ulysses, to Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and to Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts). In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to 're-function' the apparatus of theatrical production to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era—particularly over the 'high art/popular culture' dichotomy—vying with the likes of Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin. Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger insists that he is "the most important materialist writer of our time."
As Jameson among others has stressed, "Brecht is also ‘Brecht’"—collective and collaborative working methods were inherent to his approach. This 'Brecht' was a collective subject that "certainly seemed to have a distinctive style (the one we now call 'Brechtian') but was no longer personal in the bourgeois or individualistic sense." During the course of his career, Brecht sustained many long-lasting creative relationships with other writers, composers, scenographers, directors, dramaturgs and actors; the list includes: Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau, Slatan Dudow, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Caspar Neher, Teo Otto, Karl von Appen, Ernst Busch, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Therese Giehse, Angelika Hurwicz, and Helene Weigel herself. This is "theatre as collective experiment [...] as something radically different from theatre as expression or as experience."
There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices; dramatists and directors in whom one may trace a clear Brechtian legacy include: Dario Fo, Augusto Boal, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Pina Bausch, Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill. In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice; Brecht's influence may be detected in the films of Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Lindsay Anderson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, Ritwik Ghatak, Lars von Trier, Jan Bucquoy and Hal Hartley.
During the war years, Brecht became a prominent writer of the Exilliteratur. He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most famous plays.
From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama (which constitutes that medium's rendering of 'autonomization' or the 'non-organic work of art'—related in kind to the strategy of divergent chapters in Joyce's novel Ulysses, to Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and to Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts). In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to 're-function' the apparatus of theatrical production to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era—particularly over the 'high art/popular culture' dichotomy—vying with the likes of Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin. Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger insists that he is "the most important materialist writer of our time."
As Jameson among others has stressed, "Brecht is also ‘Brecht’"—collective and collaborative working methods were inherent to his approach. This 'Brecht' was a collective subject that "certainly seemed to have a distinctive style (the one we now call 'Brechtian') but was no longer personal in the bourgeois or individualistic sense." During the course of his career, Brecht sustained many long-lasting creative relationships with other writers, composers, scenographers, directors, dramaturgs and actors; the list includes: Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau, Slatan Dudow, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Caspar Neher, Teo Otto, Karl von Appen, Ernst Busch, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Therese Giehse, Angelika Hurwicz, and Helene Weigel herself. This is "theatre as collective experiment [...] as something radically different from theatre as expression or as experience."
There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices; dramatists and directors in whom one may trace a clear Brechtian legacy include: Dario Fo, Augusto Boal, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Pina Bausch, Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill. In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice; Brecht's influence may be detected in the films of Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Lindsay Anderson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, Ritwik Ghatak, Lars von Trier, Jan Bucquoy and Hal Hartley.
During the war years, Brecht became a prominent writer of the Exilliteratur. He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most famous plays.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 14, 2025
Baal: darkness/fall of Byronic outsider. Drums: post-war discontent. Jungle: existential struggle. Edward: creative adaptation. Shorts: intermittently amusing.
May 27, 2019
I – Introduction covers his time in Bavaria, 1918-24.
Baal: debauched auteur ruins his life, insisting on “more wine” (6) while pointless bourgeois want to “disseminate an atmosphere of upheaval” (7), say. When asked to “agree that sexual intercourse is dirty,” protagonist replies “that’s the cry of the swine who are no good at it” (10). Contrary to Griffin’s Nazis, he thinks “the sky is wide open” (12) and wants to “wallow in white bodies” (20)—certainly a liberal ideology of fungibility of persons, invasively applied to interpersonal relations here, in his insistence that “it doesn’t matter who! As long as she has the face of a woman” (21). A zone of indistinction in one’s being “too full of religion or too full of schnapps” (25). He causes a riot because “he gave them the naked truth” (27)—which is bad for business. He loves “people who have miscalculated” (31); he, like Faust, will “have our own unrest” (33). Though he’s “the most hardened sinner” (36), he recognizes it as “you’ve got something inside you that you cover up. You’re evil, just like me, a devil” (37). i.e., “I violated corpses twice” (38), a “degenerate beast” (39). When asked if he believes in God: “I’ve always believed in myself. But it’s possible to become an atheist” (42). “Past. What a strange word” (43). From the protagonist’s poem on a dead person: “As her pale body decayed in the water there / It happened (very slowly) that God gradually forgot it” (46), which is probably the most marvelous thing in the play, conceptually. (“You’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately. I suppose you haven’t had a woman for quite a while?” (50)—though the direction of the causality is not established.) “What is flesh? It decays, like spirit [!]” (52).
Drums in the Night: soldier long presumed dead returns from world war I, his world turned inside out—mostly because, again, of liberal fungibility of persons doctrine imported to interpersonal relations, in that “any man is worth his weight in gold” (61). It takes place during the Spartacist uprising and the characters (other than the ghostly protagonist) are all bourgeois types who fear the “vultures of revolution” (66). To them, “the Reds are having a witches’ sabbath” (67). For these worthless rich persons, the revolutionaries “should all be lined up against the wall”—“anybody that’s dissatisfied, shoot him (68). It is for them truly “the end of the world” (74). But in the same breath: “time is money” (75). The soldier’s lover recounts how
In the Jungle of Cities: somewhat incomprehensible. Two guys swap status and wealth in a bizarre duel, in Chicago (Brecht has a thing for Chicago, setting several plays there): they are “comrades in a metaphysical conflict” (156). “The men who conquer the world like to lie on their backs” (134)—I’m scratching my head, too. Something about how “it’s so hard to harm a man, to destroy him is utterly impossible” (145), which must be an abstraction growing out of German idealist philosophy: “a man never gets finished off all at once, but at least a hundred different times. A man has too many possibilities” (149); “man is too durable. That’s his main fault” (153). Something else in “you’ve succumbed to the black plague of this planet, the lust for human contact” (156): “man’s infinite isolation makes enmity an unattainable goal” (157). In this context, the anti-agambenian point is made that “bare life is better than any other kind of life” (158).
The volume also contains an adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II: “Our plans make no provision for it” (245). Also a bunch of one act plays, not epic theatre—some effective moments in them, though: an amusing wedding, a teen sex comedy, a blind man tells off an emperor, a sermon in a brothel, an adultery confounded. The text concludes with the normal notes and drafts for this series.
Baal: debauched auteur ruins his life, insisting on “more wine” (6) while pointless bourgeois want to “disseminate an atmosphere of upheaval” (7), say. When asked to “agree that sexual intercourse is dirty,” protagonist replies “that’s the cry of the swine who are no good at it” (10). Contrary to Griffin’s Nazis, he thinks “the sky is wide open” (12) and wants to “wallow in white bodies” (20)—certainly a liberal ideology of fungibility of persons, invasively applied to interpersonal relations here, in his insistence that “it doesn’t matter who! As long as she has the face of a woman” (21). A zone of indistinction in one’s being “too full of religion or too full of schnapps” (25). He causes a riot because “he gave them the naked truth” (27)—which is bad for business. He loves “people who have miscalculated” (31); he, like Faust, will “have our own unrest” (33). Though he’s “the most hardened sinner” (36), he recognizes it as “you’ve got something inside you that you cover up. You’re evil, just like me, a devil” (37). i.e., “I violated corpses twice” (38), a “degenerate beast” (39). When asked if he believes in God: “I’ve always believed in myself. But it’s possible to become an atheist” (42). “Past. What a strange word” (43). From the protagonist’s poem on a dead person: “As her pale body decayed in the water there / It happened (very slowly) that God gradually forgot it” (46), which is probably the most marvelous thing in the play, conceptually. (“You’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately. I suppose you haven’t had a woman for quite a while?” (50)—though the direction of the causality is not established.) “What is flesh? It decays, like spirit [!]” (52).
Drums in the Night: soldier long presumed dead returns from world war I, his world turned inside out—mostly because, again, of liberal fungibility of persons doctrine imported to interpersonal relations, in that “any man is worth his weight in gold” (61). It takes place during the Spartacist uprising and the characters (other than the ghostly protagonist) are all bourgeois types who fear the “vultures of revolution” (66). To them, “the Reds are having a witches’ sabbath” (67). For these worthless rich persons, the revolutionaries “should all be lined up against the wall”—“anybody that’s dissatisfied, shoot him (68). It is for them truly “the end of the world” (74). But in the same breath: “time is money” (75). The soldier’s lover recounts how
in the beginning you were with me a long time, your voice still fresh. When I went down the hall, I brushed against you, and out in the meadow you called me from behind the maple tree. Even though they wrote that you’d been shot through the face and buried two days later. But then one day it was different. When I went down the hall, it was empty, and the maple tree didn’t speak. When I stood up from bending over the wash trough, I still saw your face, but when I spread the washing over the grass, I didn’t see it, and all that time I didn’t know what you looked like. But I should have waited. (77)--which is about as a good a summation of missing someone as it gets. Her new fiancé complains that she is “letting him lick you with his eyes” (85), which is something of an escalation over the more normal opener of apodyopsis. Something of an unfinished mess, ultimately.
In the Jungle of Cities: somewhat incomprehensible. Two guys swap status and wealth in a bizarre duel, in Chicago (Brecht has a thing for Chicago, setting several plays there): they are “comrades in a metaphysical conflict” (156). “The men who conquer the world like to lie on their backs” (134)—I’m scratching my head, too. Something about how “it’s so hard to harm a man, to destroy him is utterly impossible” (145), which must be an abstraction growing out of German idealist philosophy: “a man never gets finished off all at once, but at least a hundred different times. A man has too many possibilities” (149); “man is too durable. That’s his main fault” (153). Something else in “you’ve succumbed to the black plague of this planet, the lust for human contact” (156): “man’s infinite isolation makes enmity an unattainable goal” (157). In this context, the anti-agambenian point is made that “bare life is better than any other kind of life” (158).
The volume also contains an adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II: “Our plans make no provision for it” (245). Also a bunch of one act plays, not epic theatre—some effective moments in them, though: an amusing wedding, a teen sex comedy, a blind man tells off an emperor, a sermon in a brothel, an adultery confounded. The text concludes with the normal notes and drafts for this series.
October 19, 2025
Most of the plays in this volume are mid. My two favorites are Baal and A Respectable Wedding.
For Baal, I got a very strong impression of a homosexual subtext to the play which, however, I didn't see written about anywhere else, so I'll write a little bit here. To preface, Brecht deliberately wrote Baal, the character, so no reader could interpret him as somehow a misunderstood hero, and my reading doesn't do that. Anyway, Baal is, on the surface, just a boozer and a womanizing rapist who is infatuated with his own self image as a degenerate pleasure-seeker. Baal goes on and on about how much he loves fucking and drinking and making music, etc. In his actual interactions with women, what he really tend to express is disgust, impatience, and a desire to get sex over with. These ideas alone aren't necessarily in contradiction, like he could just be a hedonist who is annoyed by the presence of others in general or women in particular, but I don't think that's the case. Less emphasized, I think, but more important is the contrast in the depth of relationships Baal has with specific male characters, like Ekart. When Baal, the apparent sex-crazed hedonist is with a woman he does not express, much joy or gratification by her presence, and when he kills, or his actions result in the death of a woman, it affects him not at all. When a male woodcutter, Teddy, who wasn't in the prior narrative, shows up dead in a disconnected scene, his coworkers don't value his passing and seek to scavenge whatever valuables off his corpse, but Baal, the hedonist, is extraordinarily emotionally affected and alludes to some emotionally intimate connection he had with Teddy. The only characters that Baal seems to have feelings this intense for are men, and chiefly, his friend Ekart. Anyway, in one of the final interactions between Baal and Ekart, Baal says flat out that he loves Ekart, that he doesn't care for women anymore, and in the penultimate interaction between the two, Ekart brings this up again, asking to confirm that Baal has not been with women recently. The very final interaction between the two, I believe, was intended by Brecht to demonstrate the utterly non-heroic and lonely ending that a festering anti-social superiority complex will lead to. However, the scene, read literally, is Baal coming back after 8 years of apparently not speaking to Ekart or anyone from the bar, and upon seeing Ekart sexually harassing the waitress at the bar, going into a rage where he kills Ekart, whose last words are suggesting that Baal is jealous of the waitress and that he wished he was Ekart's lover. Baal dies sad and alone immediately after killing the man he has had the most intimate relationship with in the entire play. To me, Baal kills Ekart out of an impotent depressive rage rooted in his own inability to express his affection for Ekart -- the only not-purely-transitive or shallow pseudo-pleasure that Baal has. Baal's personality formed around this idea of being a shall0w hedonist, but that life leaves his empty, as he sought something transcendental, meaningful, which he could not have. Ekart really was an ordinary heterosexual womanizer, while Baal was something more pathetic -- someone using the womanizer persona as a cover to be close to a man he loved.
The short play, A Respectable Wedding, is about reactionary prosociality, which is rooted in an in-group/out-group divide, wherein all the members of the in-group are originally, or come to be, through the formation of such a divide, united essentially by their conflict with the out-group. Everyone in the play hates one another, but they are brought together in the end by the fact that they hate everyone else even more.
I don't have much to say about the other plays. Being early in Brecht's career, it's unsurprising that some of these were written just to pay the bills.
For Baal, I got a very strong impression of a homosexual subtext to the play which, however, I didn't see written about anywhere else, so I'll write a little bit here. To preface, Brecht deliberately wrote Baal, the character, so no reader could interpret him as somehow a misunderstood hero, and my reading doesn't do that. Anyway, Baal is, on the surface, just a boozer and a womanizing rapist who is infatuated with his own self image as a degenerate pleasure-seeker. Baal goes on and on about how much he loves fucking and drinking and making music, etc. In his actual interactions with women, what he really tend to express is disgust, impatience, and a desire to get sex over with. These ideas alone aren't necessarily in contradiction, like he could just be a hedonist who is annoyed by the presence of others in general or women in particular, but I don't think that's the case. Less emphasized, I think, but more important is the contrast in the depth of relationships Baal has with specific male characters, like Ekart. When Baal, the apparent sex-crazed hedonist is with a woman he does not express, much joy or gratification by her presence, and when he kills, or his actions result in the death of a woman, it affects him not at all. When a male woodcutter, Teddy, who wasn't in the prior narrative, shows up dead in a disconnected scene, his coworkers don't value his passing and seek to scavenge whatever valuables off his corpse, but Baal, the hedonist, is extraordinarily emotionally affected and alludes to some emotionally intimate connection he had with Teddy. The only characters that Baal seems to have feelings this intense for are men, and chiefly, his friend Ekart. Anyway, in one of the final interactions between Baal and Ekart, Baal says flat out that he loves Ekart, that he doesn't care for women anymore, and in the penultimate interaction between the two, Ekart brings this up again, asking to confirm that Baal has not been with women recently. The very final interaction between the two, I believe, was intended by Brecht to demonstrate the utterly non-heroic and lonely ending that a festering anti-social superiority complex will lead to. However, the scene, read literally, is Baal coming back after 8 years of apparently not speaking to Ekart or anyone from the bar, and upon seeing Ekart sexually harassing the waitress at the bar, going into a rage where he kills Ekart, whose last words are suggesting that Baal is jealous of the waitress and that he wished he was Ekart's lover. Baal dies sad and alone immediately after killing the man he has had the most intimate relationship with in the entire play. To me, Baal kills Ekart out of an impotent depressive rage rooted in his own inability to express his affection for Ekart -- the only not-purely-transitive or shallow pseudo-pleasure that Baal has. Baal's personality formed around this idea of being a shall0w hedonist, but that life leaves his empty, as he sought something transcendental, meaningful, which he could not have. Ekart really was an ordinary heterosexual womanizer, while Baal was something more pathetic -- someone using the womanizer persona as a cover to be close to a man he loved.
The short play, A Respectable Wedding, is about reactionary prosociality, which is rooted in an in-group/out-group divide, wherein all the members of the in-group are originally, or come to be, through the formation of such a divide, united essentially by their conflict with the out-group. Everyone in the play hates one another, but they are brought together in the end by the fact that they hate everyone else even more.
I don't have much to say about the other plays. Being early in Brecht's career, it's unsurprising that some of these were written just to pay the bills.
July 11, 2018
Edward the Second *** – This is an adaptation rather than an original work by Brecht and Feuchtwanger – it’s an adaptation of a German translation of an English play made in German and translated back to English. I read Marlowe’s original play years ago and though I don’t remember a lot about it, I know that I didn’t like it much.
Brecht seems to follow Marlowe’s original plot and structure closely, but slims down the cast and takes a red pencil to the Marlowe’s rhetorical flourishes. It’s not, though, like he put it in modern language. (At least from what I can tell of the translation.) It still has some of the stiff formality of the Elizabethans. (But maybe that's just the nature of a "royal" story.)
I thought it was very good up to Gaveston’s death, but then I felt the clunk of the gears awkwardly shifting as the play suddenly becames something totally different at the end. At the beginning, Edward is hated for is indecent love of Gaveston, but by the end he is beloved because he is pitied for his treatment and because he will not abdicate to his son. (Which seems kind of selfish to me.) In neither story did I admire Edward, and little seems to hold the two pieces together (other than the historical record). It seems to me the theme should have been the fickleness of people.
A final note: I don’t think anyone would cite Brecht as a beacon of poetic theatre, but he’s done a number of plays in verse. Granted, some are adaptations of plays in verse (i.e., Edward the Second and Round Heads), but others are original works like Arturo Ui and Saint Joan of the Stockyards, and I think a case could be argued for musicals to be a form of verse drama. Though unseen and perhaps unremarked, poetic drama continued to be practiced throughout 20th century Western drama (and continues today).
Brecht seems to follow Marlowe’s original plot and structure closely, but slims down the cast and takes a red pencil to the Marlowe’s rhetorical flourishes. It’s not, though, like he put it in modern language. (At least from what I can tell of the translation.) It still has some of the stiff formality of the Elizabethans. (But maybe that's just the nature of a "royal" story.)
I thought it was very good up to Gaveston’s death, but then I felt the clunk of the gears awkwardly shifting as the play suddenly becames something totally different at the end. At the beginning, Edward is hated for is indecent love of Gaveston, but by the end he is beloved because he is pitied for his treatment and because he will not abdicate to his son. (Which seems kind of selfish to me.) In neither story did I admire Edward, and little seems to hold the two pieces together (other than the historical record). It seems to me the theme should have been the fickleness of people.
A final note: I don’t think anyone would cite Brecht as a beacon of poetic theatre, but he’s done a number of plays in verse. Granted, some are adaptations of plays in verse (i.e., Edward the Second and Round Heads), but others are original works like Arturo Ui and Saint Joan of the Stockyards, and I think a case could be argued for musicals to be a form of verse drama. Though unseen and perhaps unremarked, poetic drama continued to be practiced throughout 20th century Western drama (and continues today).
February 18, 2025
Bertolt Brecht's early plays reveal some emergent criticism against the bourgeois background of his own life. How much this translates in these sometimes juvenile attempts depends on the reader—albeit I doubt any of these plays besides Baal and maybe In the Jungle of Cities will ever be performed on any regular degree in English. The highs of In the Jungle and "Lux in Tenebris" highlight some of the humor and wit within these adolescent works while "Driving Out a Devil," the weakest of the collection, at least provides insight into the promiscuous behavior of Brecht himself.
September 29, 2023
Baal is great, everything else in this is skippable tbh
June 9, 2024
Brecht is one of my favourite playwrights. I wanted to see what his early work was like. It turns out to be very different from the Brecht I know well. There are nine plays in this early volume, four full-length and five shorts, and one of them stood out high above the others.
When I was younger and a regular in my city library I often would glance at the collected volumes of Brecht plays and wonder what they might be about. One day I knew I would find out. The title of his first play, Baal, always intrigued me; but now I have finally got to grips with it, I remain a little unconvinced by it. For a start I am not sure I fully understand the plot, or rather the way the play develops seems too random. The dialogue is strange, the scenes appear quite disconnected. I rapidly lost sympathy for the main character and ended up not caring about him at all.
Drums in the Night was much better, although Brecht himself was very dissatisfied with this play, which is about an individual who refuses to take part in a revolution even though his history of suffering means that he ought to be a prime revolutionary. This individual is an ex soldier, rather a brutal man, who returns from overseas to find that the woman he was engaged to is now with another man. His aim is to get her back, no matter the consequences. He abandons all sense of community in order to achieve his ultimately selfish ends.
The play that stood high above the others for me is In the Jungle of Cities, which I regard as a magnificent play in every way. It's the very absurd but powerful story of two men in Chicago at the start of the 20th Century who embark on a fight that will destroy one or both of them, and the reasons for this fight are totally unclear. In fact there are no reasons. The fight is conducted on the whim of one of the combatants. This (in my view) is Brecht at his best.
The Life of King Edward II of England is a real oddity and doesn't feel at all like Brecht, and yet I enjoyed it. Very easy to read and always interesting, and it has made me want to learn more about the real historical basis of the action, but I am also glad that Brecht didn't persist in this mode.
The five shorts were a mixed bag, mostly amusing, sometimes bitter. The Beggar, or the Dead Dog was a fable with surreal touches. The Catch is probably my favourite of the shorts. It is a sort of farce but dark in tone, rather like Driving out a Devil, but with a more satisfying ending. As for A Respectable Wedding and Lux in Tenebris, I enjoyed both of them, but neither struck me as particularly memorable.
I have read a great many plays of Bertolt Brecht now and my favourite remains the very first one I ever read, The Good Person of Szchewan. My second favourite is the second one I read, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. My third favourite is the third one I read, Mother Courage and her Children.
I seem to have entered a spiral of diminishing returns. Mind you, I have only seen two of his plays in performance, so I am missing out on the real Brecht experience. The one I would most like to see in a theatre is The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahoganny because I suspect it's the most fun to watch.
When I was younger and a regular in my city library I often would glance at the collected volumes of Brecht plays and wonder what they might be about. One day I knew I would find out. The title of his first play, Baal, always intrigued me; but now I have finally got to grips with it, I remain a little unconvinced by it. For a start I am not sure I fully understand the plot, or rather the way the play develops seems too random. The dialogue is strange, the scenes appear quite disconnected. I rapidly lost sympathy for the main character and ended up not caring about him at all.
Drums in the Night was much better, although Brecht himself was very dissatisfied with this play, which is about an individual who refuses to take part in a revolution even though his history of suffering means that he ought to be a prime revolutionary. This individual is an ex soldier, rather a brutal man, who returns from overseas to find that the woman he was engaged to is now with another man. His aim is to get her back, no matter the consequences. He abandons all sense of community in order to achieve his ultimately selfish ends.
The play that stood high above the others for me is In the Jungle of Cities, which I regard as a magnificent play in every way. It's the very absurd but powerful story of two men in Chicago at the start of the 20th Century who embark on a fight that will destroy one or both of them, and the reasons for this fight are totally unclear. In fact there are no reasons. The fight is conducted on the whim of one of the combatants. This (in my view) is Brecht at his best.
The Life of King Edward II of England is a real oddity and doesn't feel at all like Brecht, and yet I enjoyed it. Very easy to read and always interesting, and it has made me want to learn more about the real historical basis of the action, but I am also glad that Brecht didn't persist in this mode.
The five shorts were a mixed bag, mostly amusing, sometimes bitter. The Beggar, or the Dead Dog was a fable with surreal touches. The Catch is probably my favourite of the shorts. It is a sort of farce but dark in tone, rather like Driving out a Devil, but with a more satisfying ending. As for A Respectable Wedding and Lux in Tenebris, I enjoyed both of them, but neither struck me as particularly memorable.
I have read a great many plays of Bertolt Brecht now and my favourite remains the very first one I ever read, The Good Person of Szchewan. My second favourite is the second one I read, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. My third favourite is the third one I read, Mother Courage and her Children.
I seem to have entered a spiral of diminishing returns. Mind you, I have only seen two of his plays in performance, so I am missing out on the real Brecht experience. The one I would most like to see in a theatre is The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahoganny because I suspect it's the most fun to watch.
January 23, 2008
I learned a lot about Brecht reading these early plays. Some of what I learned is that his writing improved GREATLY over time. It started out not so awesome. Of course, that could have been some of the translations. They were certainly greatly varied in their subject. However, you could see society screwing people sneaking into his work.
August 14, 2007
this volume contains 5 plays: Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, The Life of Edward the Second of England, and Five One-Act Plays. brecht is a classic by himself. a must read for theatre enthusiasts.
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