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Brecht Sourcebook ed. by Carol Martin and Henry Bial (review)
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 44, Number 2, Summer 2001
- pp. 247-249
- 10.1353/mdr.2001.0034
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Reviews CAROL MARTIN and HENRY SIAL, eds. Brecht Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. 242. $75.00 (Hb); $24.99 (Pb). Reviewed by John Fuegi, University ofMaryland, College Park For a number of years, it has been the practice of Ihe importanl journal The Drama Review (hereafIer referred 10 as TDR) 10 mine pasl issues and publish bound volumes devoled 10 a particular theme. Of this series of volumes as a whole, series editor Richard Schechner writes, "New materials and introductions bring Ihe volumes up to dale" (n. pag.). Would Ihat Ihis were really so wilh Ihis particular volume, which, sadly, time seems largely to have passed by. The introduction 10 the volume makes no serious effort 10 contextualize essays that are severely time-bound. To reprinl Martin Esslin's 1966 essay ยท "Brechl and Ihe English Theatre" (an excellent piece in ils lime) a third of a century later, but with no indicalion to the reader Ihal whal Esslin Ireals as "now" is NOW way back Ihen, is bewildering at best. Brilish drama is not now what it was then. Much the same problem arises with Henry Glade's excellent-for-1967 piece on Brecht on the stages of the USSR. There is nothing in this 1999 volume to indicate that the USSR no longer exists and that Brecht on Russian slages today is an entirely different thing. The transcripts of the valuable interviews W. Stuart McDowell conducted with those who worked with Brecht in the early days in Munich have worn well since they were first published in 1976, but background material on other work that has been done on this important period would have helped the contemporary reader. Several now near-classic essays commenting on particular works or problem areas (Ernst Schumacher on Galileo Galilei, Hans-Joachim Bunge on The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Eric Bentley's piece on comparative theories of acting) have worn best, and the reprinting of them with virtuModern Drama, 42:2 (2001) 247 REVIEWS ally no contextualizing commentary generally works well. However, not letting people know that the moment Bunge began to depart from Brecht orthodoxy he was thrown out of his job at the Bertolt Brecht Archive leaves Bunge's 1959 essay very much in a political vacuum. No hint is given of the courage it took on his part to disagree with the squeaky-clean personal and political image of Brecht being marketed at that time. Similarly, no contextualizing hint is given that Bentley has been subjected for decades to attacks by the orthodox Brecht industry for his willingness to discuss the Brecht who did not fully fit the carefully constructed "Brecht" being sold by Helene Weigel, Suhrkamp Verlag, and the government of the Genman Democratic Republic. When I asked Bentley to serve as one of the founding editors of the Brecht Yearbook in '971 , Helene Weigel said to me, during a conversation in her office at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, "He [Bentley) is an outspoken enemy of us." She made it clear that to choose anyone who disagreed was to become subject to unrelenting abuse. "Spin" rather than fairness was what she, as Brecht's official widow, clearly sought. The Brecht world presented in this Brecht Sourcebook is overwhelmingly like a mammoth found frozen intact in Siberian ice. It is difficult to see, except for purely commercial considerations, why the transfer of this particular group of essays from the tundra of TOR is of particular value to current students. The essays are still available there, and there, of course, we expect them to reflect their own time rather than ours. To repackage them without providing the "new materials and introductions" promised for the series as a whole is disappointing . The material taken from other sources to extend the volume is not much help either. As neither Barclay Goldsmith's non-TOR essay "Brecht and Chicano Theatre" (1979) nor Karen Laughlin's non-TOR piece "Brechtian Theory and American Feminist Theatre" (1990) brings us up to the present, reprinting them provides us with additional time capsules from those periods rather than with any contextualization in terms of contemporary work being done. In my view, just one essay - and one not originally published...