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Reviewed by:
  • A Man’s a Man by Bertolt Brecht
  • Aleksandra Djuricic
A Man’s a Man. By Bertolt Brecht. Belgrade Dramatic Theatre, Belgrade, Yugoslavia. 17 April 1996.

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Figure 1.

Sandra Ilic, Bojan Ivic, Nebojsa Ilic, Ivan Jevtovic, and Daniel Sic in the Belgrade Dramatic Theatre production of Bertolt Brecht’s A Man’s A Man, directed by Irena Ristic. Photo: Rade Prelic, courtesy of the Tanjug agency.

During the last four years of fighting, not a single play by Bertolt Brecht has been produced on the Belgrade stage. Though it’s hard to say whether the average theatregoer has been aware of the absence, in fact before 1991 there was at least one Brecht play per season in the repertory of Belgrade’s theatres. Mother Courage and The Causasian Chalk Circle each developed a strong following and remained in the repertory for several seasons. After this break of several years, director Irena Ristic has turned again to Brecht while doing her best to interpret A Man’s A Man in a way close to Yugoslavia’s present circumstances. The fresh memory and tangible proximity of war has made the Belgrade public especially sensitive to the ambiguities and allusions that echo in the actors’ lines.

Ristic counted on the audience to play an active role in the production. To convince us at the start that the play was a comedy, she staged Brecht’s “interlude,” The Baby Elephant, in the lobby before the rest of the play began—a procedure the playwright originally intended. An animated troupe of [End Page 498] young actors entered singing, followed by a small band, intentionally out of practice, its members creating the impression that they have an engagement nightly as musicians in Leocadia Begbick’s wagon. The director played up the obvious similarity between Begbick and the more famous canteen owner, Mother Courage. She staged the character as a kind of universal archetype, giving her a greater role on stage than indicated in the text. As played by Sandra Ilic, Begbick also performed the function of a narrator, fully conscious of the meaning of her (well-delivered) songs.

The Belgrade public first become acquainted with Brecht in the late 1950s thanks to touring productions. Their first taste of Brecht was The Threepenny Opera, and the memory of the play’s songs has lasted ever since. Ristic bore this in mind, toying with Brecht’s ambiguity in providing theatre that “entertains.” Towards this end, the actors in The Baby Elephant mock the audience for coming to the theatre expecting a bourgeois diversion. As a result, the spectators enter the theatre looking both sober and curious—wondering what would become of Galy Gay, the confirmed loser and wretch whose only possession is his own “self,” and at the same time the man who never says “no.”

The young actor Ivan Jevtovic convincingly played Galy Gay’s simple desire somehow to buy a fish today, his nervousness increased by the fact that his wife has already put a pot on the stove. The image of Galy Gay and his wife over the boiling pot held the audience rapt—for reasons both relevant and irrelevant to the play itself. The audience was inadvertently trapped—or rather, moved back to square one. By supporting Galy Gay they prayed for themselves, for the ordinary life that they had lost—silently wishing to go home, where a boiling pot waits for a fish. The absurdities of everyday life suddenly seemed magnificent. Galy Gay only becomes truly powerful in a crowd, among other soldiers, but the audience wanted him weak again. Polly Baker’s words in scene 8, delivered by Nebojsa Ilic, reinforced this point: “Before every attack a soldier is given a large glass of whiskey free of charge, after which his courage knows no bounds” (trans. Gerhard Nellhaus, in Brecht: Collected Plays, ed. Ralph Manheim and John Willett, Vol. 2 [New York: Random House-Vintage, 1976/1977], 30). It is not uniforms but alcohol that turns common people into soldiers in any senseless war. In uniform, the man is still the same man he has always been, and therefore Galy Gay the soldier...

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