In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Peter Weiss and Documentary Theatre: Song ofa Scarecrow IRMELI NIEMI • IN ITS ATTEMPT TO ILLUSTRATE MAN'S CONDITION and the world of our time the theater has two alternatives. It can create on the stage a reality of its own where the laws of the world outside the theater are only partly valid. The other alternative is to approximate to the world outside and to start with the social and historical facts. The type of Piscator's "agitprop" theater has appealed strongly to writers and directors in the theater of the 1960s and this has resulted in a new wave of social and political activity. At the same time the theater itself has undergone great changes: the similarity of views required for participation in political documentary theater has favored the formation of small, free-form theatrical groups. The actors of the play are often obliged to have the same view of life and the same political ideas as those expressed by the author and his play. In the documentary theater the author shapes the social or political theme by choosing particular text material often from statistical tables, memoirs, newspapers and letters; the material may be worked up and revised to such an extent that the form of presentation is different and only the core idea remains. Sometimes, however, the documentary material is quoted unchanged, but here again it is the choice of quotations which actually determines the nature of the text. It is evident that in coimection with this kind of play one cannot speak of the individual portrayal of man, and even less of character studies. Instead of characters the political theater makes use of facts and figures. It does not direct its attention primarily to human beings but to the circumstances and situations in which people live and act. The persons may be historically authentic and transmit an individual picture based on documents. More often one person represents a whole group; a kind of anti-individualism can also be created by letting several parts be played by a single actor. 29 30 IRMELI NIEMI In the plays of Peter Weiss the grouping of characters always takes place strictly according to political and economic attitudes. Mass movements and the groupings within them seem to provide him with his most interesting dramatic material. People's actions are thus directly caused by their groups and the form of society in which they live. Song of a Scarecrow (Lusitanischer Popanz), the third political play by Weiss, is a depiction of the Africans' fight for freedom in Angola. However, the scene could just as well be the Germany of Weiss's previous play (Die Ermittiung), or the Vietnam of his next (Viet Nam Diskurs), any part of the world indeed, where an immense gulf exists between different kinds of people. Angola, says Weiss, is, or ought to be, as burning a question as the Berlin wall, its political situation reflecting in his opinion the same kind of abnormality and challenge.! A world divided into two social systems forms the basis of Weiss's dialectic drama. It is his social commitment which determines his choice of subjects and themes. An increasing number of authors have recently expressed the view that the only hope for the oppressed is an armed revolution. The idealists, they argue, consume their energy in inefficient charity; the liberals emphasize, in addition to sympathy, their own "inner freedom," but the blindest of the blind are those "doctrinaires" who oppose the world in which they themselves live and whose activity remains verbal and consumes itself in its own excitement. In opposing these ideas Weiss uses the example of Angola and explains that for him the "doctrinaire" attitude is the only one and also the most influential: "By obtaining as much information as possible about the countries most exploited by 'the rich,' we can bring these countries closer to ourselves and promote our solidarity with them.,,2 One of the most important tasks of the documentary theater is the spreading of this kind of information and the criticism it implies in thus distributing it. Weiss has given a detailed account of what he thinks should be the objects of criticism: deliberate concealment of...

pdf

Share