Introduction

Introduction DA VID A. BLOSTEIN The life of Bertolt Brecht spanned little more than half the twentieth century, yet if there is one figure that will be looked back upon as central to the era's theatre, it will probably be "poor B.B." from the Black Forest. Some reasons are immediately apparent. He is an unavoidable figure in theatre because, apan from the greatness and performability of his considerable body of plays, he was a theoretician who took on Aristotle, a director who took on Stanislavsky , a political activist who took on Hitler, a screenwriter who (slyly) took on the House Un-American Activities Committee, and eventually a cultural icon struggling with how much to take on in the country that gave him his theatre . Perhaps most important is that he was a poet. It is increasingly apparent that had Brecht never written a play he would be remembered as a major twentieth-century poet. But the importance for the theatre is that, while poetry is generally regarded as essentially untranslatable, it is the Brechtian poetry that even those who don't know German find useful, adaptable, and transformable . It is what Jean Cocteau called the poetry oftheatre: the use of text, movement, set, costume, gesture, and voice as metaphor, synecdoche, enjambement , rhyme - in short, as a new embodiment, and for a very different purpose , of Wagner's ideal Gesammtkunstwerk. That purpose, as Brecht and those who have brought him to the widespread stages of the globe hoped, was in some way - a way available to theatre as to no other art - to change the world. In entertaining audiences through narrative disjunction and by making artifice transparent, Brechtian plays and performances battle social and political complacency, denying deterministic causality and essentially affirming free will. In a century dominated by war, persecution, exile, and helplessness, Brecht's theories and practice attract those theatre practitioners who are less afraid of attack from aesthetic purists than of the prick of their own social consciences . If this is a propagandistic use of poetry, it is not hot-headed. Brechtian theModern Drama, 42 (1999) 173 174 DAVID A. BLOSTEIN atre is cool because it is essentially comic. The poetry is not in the pity but in the irony - the knowledge, for instance, that an individual can do little but that that little is worth doing. And despite the cultivated distancing, there is a basic sympathy at work. There is ironic sympathy for the evil-doers (as encapsulated in the swollen veins of the demon in a Japanese mask), but also for those who wish to do good when the world - the social, political, economic conditions that we inherit - makes it difficult to be good to others and to oneself at the same time. It is this dilemma'that - in contrast to the spiritual or sexual dilemmas of other major modem playwrights - makes Brecht feel local in such different places as Berlin and Belfast, Shanghai and Slio Paolo. An image as primitive as "anthropophagy," swallowing, digesting, and so remaking Brecht in the form of the local body, is specially apt, for Brecht deals with life not on the level of aristocratic honour or lbsenian middle-class morality, but on a universal level of unaccommodated man. When Brecht is transformed successfully, he is transformed into the local habitation and name for a universal experience. The unsuccessful transformations are legion, and for that Brecht was inadvertently at fault: the idea, for instance, of keeping a photographic record or "Modellbuch" of productions (for study, not for replication) has been distorted into productions like the Mermaid Theatre's Galileo in the late [950S, in which each scene was visually faithful to the Modellbueh but the rhythms of perfonnance. and the ever-present humour, were reduced to the crawl of Bernard Miles's Galileo-as-Joe-Gargery. And a wild, semi-improvisatory Latin group like Culture Clash, using home-grown issues and techniques, is arguably more Brechtian than grim-faced casts getting-it-right for the theatre historians . On the other hand, it's hard not to sympathize with "the Brechtians" when faced with the entrenched frivolousness of, say, a French production of Mother Courage festooned with bright colours. DenyilZg...