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Brecht Collected Plays #3
Collected Plays 3: St Joan of the Stockyards / The Mother / Six Lehrstucke
The most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language
Volume Three of Brecht's Collected Plays includes St Joan of the Stockyards - a play which recasts St Joan as Joan Dark springing hope into the hearts of factory workers at the mercy of meatpacker king Pierpont Mauler threatening cuts in the Depression; and the Lehrstucke or short 'didactic' pieces written during the years 1929 to 1933, are some of his most experimental work. Lindbergh's Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said Yes / He Said No, The Decision, The Exception and the Rule, and The Horatians and the Curiatians reject conventional theatre; they are spare and highly formalised, drawing on traditional Japanese and Chinese forms. They show Brecht in collaboration with the composers Hindemith, Weill and Eisler, influenced by the new techniques of montage in the visual arts and seeking new means of expression. Also included is The Mother, based on Gorky's novel about the progress of a factory strike in Tver and the journey of a peasant mother from illiteracy to card-carrying communism.
The translators include H R Hays (The Horatians and the Curiatians), Ralph Manheim (St Joan of the Stockyards), Tom Osborn (The Exception and the Rule), Geoffrey Skelton (The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent), John Willett (Lindbergh's Flight;The Decision;The Mother) and Arthur Waley (He Said Yes / He Said No). 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 Three of Brecht's Collected Plays includes St Joan of the Stockyards - a play which recasts St Joan as Joan Dark springing hope into the hearts of factory workers at the mercy of meatpacker king Pierpont Mauler threatening cuts in the Depression; and the Lehrstucke or short 'didactic' pieces written during the years 1929 to 1933, are some of his most experimental work. Lindbergh's Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said Yes / He Said No, The Decision, The Exception and the Rule, and The Horatians and the Curiatians reject conventional theatre; they are spare and highly formalised, drawing on traditional Japanese and Chinese forms. They show Brecht in collaboration with the composers Hindemith, Weill and Eisler, influenced by the new techniques of montage in the visual arts and seeking new means of expression. Also included is The Mother, based on Gorky's novel about the progress of a factory strike in Tver and the journey of a peasant mother from illiteracy to card-carrying communism.
The translators include H R Hays (The Horatians and the Curiatians), Ralph Manheim (St Joan of the Stockyards), Tom Osborn (The Exception and the Rule), Geoffrey Skelton (The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent), John Willett (Lindbergh's Flight;The Decision;The Mother) and Arthur Waley (He Said Yes / He Said No). 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.
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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About the author
Bertolt Brecht
1,603 books1,927 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 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 15, 2025
Brecht’s propaganda plays.
May 27, 2019
III – introduction for the critical years 1929-34. We can see a shift to epic technique and more overt leftwing political engagement in this volume.
St. Joan of the Stockyards: Joan of Arc fighting the good fight in the Chicago stockyards. When the factories close “Hell itself / shuts its gate in our faces” (scene II), which is a curious way to conceive the relation between work and hell. Spectres of Neumann’s analysis of fascism in how “in a gloomy time of bloody confusion / ordered disorder / planful willfulness / dehumanized humanity” (id.).
Joan initially scolds workers for their lack of “higher values,” in that they want “nothing but coarse sensual enjoyments” (id.). The monopolist stockyard owner reconsiders his business for such higher values: “I saw a steer die and it shook me so that I’m giving it all up, and have even sold my interest in the factory” (scene III). He asks Joan, who is set to agitate for the out-of-work employees, if he is right to withdraw: “I don’t know if your question is serious” (id.). He doesn’t care, feeling “as if a breath from another world is wafting toward me” (id.).
We see that a worker has fallen in a meat processing machine, and it is easier for the company that the worker “has to go out in the world as bacon” (scene IV). They try to bribe the worker’s widow with free lunch; when she accepts the bribe to not only drop her claim but accept the company’s excuse, the company offers the anecdote up to Joan that the workers’ “wickedness has no limits” (id.). Joan’s awesome reply is that
The Mother: The chorus opens by calling attention to the protagonist’s attempt to “replace the irreplaceable” and “afford the unaffordable”: “Don’t think the question of why your kitchen’s empty / Will get decided in the kitchen” (scene 1). The narrative involves a son who distributes labor organizing materials at a factory and gets in trouble thereby with the police; this draws his long suffering mother into the labor conflict and woe unto the cappies then, as she becomes progressively more involved and radicalized; the Russian setting makes the allegory for ‘mother’ Russia plain enough. She becomes a committed communist in a place where the workers “are being kept in the dark about the fact that they are exploited, and that this is a crime, and that this crime can be eliminated” (scene 6b). When she is taught to read, Brecht mixes his comedic skill with epic theatre concerns:
A bunch of one acts follow, some of which are forgettable—but they are selected here as moments of his development toward epic theatre, drawing inspiration from different national traditions. Some interesting moments however, such as in the ‘Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent,’ which argues dialectically that “To refuse help requires force / To obtain help requires force also. / As long as force reigns help can be refused. / When force no longer reigns, there is no need of help. / So you should not demand help, but abolish force. / Help and force form a single whole / And this whole must be altered.” Similarly, ‘He Said Yes/He Said No’ involves a dialectical inversion of how “Many will be found agreeing in error, but he / Would not give agreement to her illness, and / Insisted that illness has to be cured,” which reminds one of Hegelian refusal to defer to the reality of mere facts. Likewise, ‘The Exception and the Rule’ involves a labor dispute in the context of imperialist mineral extraction. The capitalist kills his employee with a very poor self defense argument, but:
St. Joan of the Stockyards: Joan of Arc fighting the good fight in the Chicago stockyards. When the factories close “Hell itself / shuts its gate in our faces” (scene II), which is a curious way to conceive the relation between work and hell. Spectres of Neumann’s analysis of fascism in how “in a gloomy time of bloody confusion / ordered disorder / planful willfulness / dehumanized humanity” (id.).
Joan initially scolds workers for their lack of “higher values,” in that they want “nothing but coarse sensual enjoyments” (id.). The monopolist stockyard owner reconsiders his business for such higher values: “I saw a steer die and it shook me so that I’m giving it all up, and have even sold my interest in the factory” (scene III). He asks Joan, who is set to agitate for the out-of-work employees, if he is right to withdraw: “I don’t know if your question is serious” (id.). He doesn’t care, feeling “as if a breath from another world is wafting toward me” (id.).
We see that a worker has fallen in a meat processing machine, and it is easier for the company that the worker “has to go out in the world as bacon” (scene IV). They try to bribe the worker’s widow with free lunch; when she accepts the bribe to not only drop her claim but accept the company’s excuse, the company offers the anecdote up to Joan that the workers’ “wickedness has no limits” (id.). Joan’s awesome reply is that
If their wickedness has no limits, their poverty has none either. Not the wickedness of the poor have you shown me, but the poverty of the poor. (id.)She continues thereafter:
Where are their morals to come from, if morals are all they have? Where can they get anything without stealing it? My dear sirs, there is such a thing as moral purchasing power. Raise that and you’ll get morality too. And by moral purchasing power, I mean something very simple and natural: money. Wages. And that brings me back to the facts of the matter. If you go on like this you’ll be eating your meat yourselves because the people out there lack purchasing power. (scene v)The plot works itself out like in Trading Places, contingent upon the market price of canned meat—ending on a Faustian invocation “Humanity! Two souls abide within thy breast! (scene XI).
The Mother: The chorus opens by calling attention to the protagonist’s attempt to “replace the irreplaceable” and “afford the unaffordable”: “Don’t think the question of why your kitchen’s empty / Will get decided in the kitchen” (scene 1). The narrative involves a son who distributes labor organizing materials at a factory and gets in trouble thereby with the police; this draws his long suffering mother into the labor conflict and woe unto the cappies then, as she becomes progressively more involved and radicalized; the Russian setting makes the allegory for ‘mother’ Russia plain enough. She becomes a committed communist in a place where the workers “are being kept in the dark about the fact that they are exploited, and that this is a crime, and that this crime can be eliminated” (scene 6b). When she is taught to read, Brecht mixes his comedic skill with epic theatre concerns:
The Teacher: Right, but you have to start with the simplest, not the hardest. ‘Hat’ is simple.Good times. This scene also produces the famous “Hungry man, grab a book: books will be your weapons” (id.). (The Teacher will also move a progression like the Mother, from hostility to the left to embracing it.) It includes a demonstration on how jingoism is wedded to the industrialists’ interests by making it a matter of patriotism to oppose strikers and leftists (scene 8b). After an execution:
Sostakovich: ‘Class War’ is a lot simpler.
The Teacher: There’s no such thing as class war. Let’s be clear about that.
Sostakovich: I can’t learn anything from you if you think there’s no class war.
Pelagea Vlassova: You’re here to learn to read and write, and you can do that here. Reading is class war. (scene 6c)
As he went to the wall where they intended to shoot him / He went towards the wall which had been built by men of his own kind / And the rifles they aimed at his breast, and the bullets / Had been made by men like himself. Merely absent / Were they therefore, or dispersed; but for him were still there / and present in the work of their hands. (scene 10)She tells us “do not fear death so much, fear an inadequate life” (id.) in disputing with a landlady who would use scripture to evict.
A bunch of one acts follow, some of which are forgettable—but they are selected here as moments of his development toward epic theatre, drawing inspiration from different national traditions. Some interesting moments however, such as in the ‘Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent,’ which argues dialectically that “To refuse help requires force / To obtain help requires force also. / As long as force reigns help can be refused. / When force no longer reigns, there is no need of help. / So you should not demand help, but abolish force. / Help and force form a single whole / And this whole must be altered.” Similarly, ‘He Said Yes/He Said No’ involves a dialectical inversion of how “Many will be found agreeing in error, but he / Would not give agreement to her illness, and / Insisted that illness has to be cured,” which reminds one of Hegelian refusal to defer to the reality of mere facts. Likewise, ‘The Exception and the Rule’ involves a labor dispute in the context of imperialist mineral extraction. The capitalist kills his employee with a very poor self defense argument, but:
Merchant: To assume that the Coolie would not strike me down at the first opportunity would have been to assume he had lost his reason.The agambenian thesis writes itself.
Judge: You may have killed a man who possibly was harmless—because you couldn’t know him to be harmless. This happens also with the police at times. They shoot into a crowd of demonstrators—quite peaceful folk—because they can’t see why these folk don’t simply drag them off their horses and lynch them. Actually, the police in such cases fire out of pure fear. And that they are afraid is proof of their good sense. You mean you couldn’t know the Coolie was the exception!
Merchant: One must go by the rule, not by the exception.
Judge: Exactly. What reason could this Coolie have had to give his tormentor something to drink?
Guide: No sensible reason.
Judge: Such is the rule: an eye for an eye. Only a fool waits for an exception.
September 13, 2021
I read The Decision and The Horatians and the Curiatians. Both are, I guess, what you’d call agitprop. The basic theme of both plays seems to be that capitalistic society is killing people so you should happily die for the party. Or something like that.
I’ve always said Brecht’s flight from the Nazis diverted his attention from absurd Communist agitprop like this, and allowed him to develop what I consider his best plays. Today, the plays in this set seem quaintly ridiculous knowing how it all turned out. It kind of feels like a cult.
I didn’t read The Mother, but I can safely say I do not recommend the rest of the plays in the set unless you have a yearning for socialist platitudes.
I’ve always said Brecht’s flight from the Nazis diverted his attention from absurd Communist agitprop like this, and allowed him to develop what I consider his best plays. Today, the plays in this set seem quaintly ridiculous knowing how it all turned out. It kind of feels like a cult.
I didn’t read The Mother, but I can safely say I do not recommend the rest of the plays in the set unless you have a yearning for socialist platitudes.
March 14, 2025
The collection of Brecht's (and his numerous collaborators') Lehrstücke are formally compelling but distant in their actual quality without seeing them performed, albeit the succinctness of The Exception and the Rule makes it among the best when read. I also find some of the translations of the songs to be odd in how awkward they treat rhyme, sometimes there, sometimes completely discarded. Maybe faithful to the German text, but that's never discussed in the editorial notes.
Read
September 2, 2008"Exception and the Rule" was one of the best things I read in college
August 23, 2007
اغلب اثار برتولد برشت به فارسی برگردانده شده؛ "سقراط مجروح" کیکاووس جهانداری / "در انبوه شهرها" عبدالرحمن صدریه / "استثناء و قاعده" محمود اعتماد زاده(م. به آذین) / "ان که گفت آری و آن که گفت نه" مصطفی رحیمی / زندگانی گالیله (گالیله ئو گالیله ئی) عبدالرحیم احمدی / "ترس و نکبت رایش سوم" شریف لنکرانی / "ننه دلاور و فرزندان او" مصطفی رحیمی / "آدم، آدم است" دو ترجمه از شریف لنکرانی و امین موید / "بچه فیل" و استنطاق لوکولوس" شریف لنکرانی / "زن نیک سچوان" دو ترجمه از فریده ی لاشایی و مهدی زمانیان / "دایره گچی قفقازی" دو ترجمه از حمید سمندریان و امین موید / "چهره های سیمون ماشار" دو ترجمه از عبدالرحمن صدریه و شریف لنکرانی / "داستان های آقای کوینر" سعید ایمانی / "داستان یک پولی"(اپرای یک پولی) هوشنگ پیرنظر / "تفنگ های ننه کارار" دو ترجمه از فریدون ایل بیگی و شریف لنکرانی / "ارباب پونتیلا و نوکرش مه آتی" سه ترجمه از عبدالرحمن صدریه، فریده ی لاشایی و رضا کرم رضایی / "درباره ی تیاتر" منیزه کامیاب و حسن بایرامی / "هیولا" همایون نوراحمر / "مادر" منیژه کامیاب و حسن بایرامی / "کله گردها و کله تیزها" بهروز مشیری / "بعل" خشایار قائم مقامی / "پیرزنی که پیر نمی نمود" کامران فانی / "گفتگوی فراریان" خشایار قائم مقامی / "اقداماتی علیه زور" ناصر صفایی / "حیوان محبوب آقای کوینر" / ناصر صفایی / "اگر کوسه ماهی ها آدم بودند" بهروز تاجور / "شوایک در جنگ جهانی دوم" دو ترجمه؛ حمید علوی، فرامرز بهزاد / "عظمت و انحطاط شهر ماهاگونی" مهدی اسفندیارفرد / "قطعه آموزشی" مینو ملک خانی / "اندیشه های متی" عبدالله کوثری / "محاکمه ی ژاندارک در روان" عبدالله کوثری / "صلیب گچی" سیاوش بیدارفکر / "قیمت آهن چنده" رضا کرم رضایی / "کریولانوس" مهدی تقوی / "اپرای سه پولی" علی اکبر خداپرست / "ژان مقدس کشتارگاه" دو ترجمه از جواد شمس و ابوالحسن ونده ور / "صعود مقاومت پذیر ارتورو اویی" افرویدون / "زندگی تیاتری من" فریدون ناظری / "روزهای کمون" کاووسی (فریده لاشایی) /"درباره تیاتر" فرامرز بهزاد / و بسیاری دیگر از آثار نوشتاری و مجموعه ی اشعار برشت
March 23, 2012
Quite interesting. I don't think I've ever read/seen a play which revolves around the rising and falling market prices of meat, but this was surprisingly enjoyable. Very deep and full of potential meaning, a good read for anyone interested in drama.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews