Seven Plays

by Bertolt Brecht

Seven plays by Bertolt Brecht, edited and with an introduction by Eric Bentley. Man's Man, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Mother Courage, Galileo, The Good Woman of Setzuan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Genres: Plays, Germany

587 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Eugen 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.

Reviews

[Victoria & David Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well it is Bertolt Brecht, but it is also very much of its time and place. And that doesn't translate into much interest ninety some years later. Techniques that he may have pioneered read today as hackneyed and lose the force they once might have had. The two exceptions are Mother Courage and Galileo. And of course The Threepenny Opera, although not included in this volume. All three touch on some sort of eternal verity and still present well.

[Ariadna73 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only read "The good woman of Setzuan", but I think it is enough to appreciate how difficult these experimental plays are. This is the story of a woman who is nice and good and for that reason people take advantage of her and she is never able to make enough money to survive, so she decides to invent a distant cousin that comes to visit and helps her to run the business. The cousin has a very though personality and is mean with people and eventually makes profit with the business by turning it into a sweat shop. Whenever the woman comes back, the business is not profitable anymore, and people start to take advantage of her again, so she has to "call in" her "cousin" more and more often until eventually she never comes back and the "cousin" takes her place. People start to suspect that this mean cousin has killed the woman, so they take the cousin to trial and at the last portion of this trial the "cousin" takes off the disguise and the original woman "comes back". The last part of the play is the woman talking to the audience, acknowledging that this play has an unhappy ending, and that there must be a way to make it better "it got to be a way, it got to be!" the woman says. The dilemma is: how? If the woman is around, people take advantage of her, the town is poor and she is unhappy and starving; but when the cousin is around -meaning that she becomes mean and abusive herself-, although the town prospers, the people are enslaved... so what to do?

[Austen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great stuff here. "The Caucasian Chalk Circle," "Galileo," and "The Good Woman of Setzuan" are Brecht at his best. Though to be a one-stop Brecht collection I would replace "In the Swamp" (AKA "In the Jungle of Cities") and "A Man's a Man" with "The Threepenny Opera" and "The Measures Taken." Eric Bentley's introduction is also rather catty and slight; I would replace it with Lotte Lenya's article "That Was a Time!" (reprinted as a introduction to some editions of "The Threepenny Opera"), Brecht's article "Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties" as revised in April 1935 (reprinted with Grove's paperback edition of "Galileo"), and the posthumous New Left Review article "Against Georg Lukács" (reprinted in Verso's Aesthetics and Politics), which, I think, capture a wider range of what was great about Brecht--one of the greatest 20th Century writers.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't honestly recommend reading all of Brecht's plays at once, or even seven of them at once. But I was pleasantly surprised by a few of these. My favorite is The Caucasian Chalk Circle, because it has an interesting structure and the sort of fable atmosphere makes the politics more palatable. But Mother Courage, Galileo and The Good Woman of Szechuan are all great plays too. Just not all at the same time, it isn't good for you. Me.