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Bertolt Brecht: Plays
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A poet first and foremost, Bertolt Brecht's genius was for language. However, because this language is built upon a certain bold and direct simplicity, his plays often lose something in the translation from his native German. Nevertheless, they contain a rare poetic vision, a voice that has rarely been paralleled in the 20th century.
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Bertolt Brecht, who died 50 years ago this week, was one of the most influential playwrights of the last century. His life and art will be celebrated all around the world by re-enactments of his plays.
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Bertolt Brecht (1889-1956) is still dead. Before he died, he became known as a playwright, stage director, and poet. He was ... known variously as Berthold, Bertie, and that dirty, lying, filthy, two-timing, commie bastard. In the German language, "brecht" is the imperative form of "brechen" (to vomit), which explains the origin of his last name.
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In February 1933... Bertolt Brecht's career was suddenly and violently interrupted as the Nazis came to power in Germany. The night after the Reichstag (German parliament building) was burned down, Brecht wisely fled with his family to Prague. His books and plays were soon banned in Germany and those who dared stage his plays found their productions unpleasantly interrupted by the police.
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Although Bertolt Brecht's first plays were written in Germany during the 1920s, he was not widely known until much later. Eventually his theories of stage presentation exerted more influence on the course of mid-century theatre in the West than did those of any other individual. This was largely because he proposed the major alternative to the Stanislavsky-oriented realism that dominated acting and the "well-made play" construction that dominated playwriting.
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Bertolt Brecht's 1928 play The Threepenny Opera was his most financially successful play and the work with which he is most closely identified. The play is an early example of his "epic theater," consisting of theatrical innovations designed to awaken audiences to social responsibility. Epic theater uses "alienating" devices, such as placards, asides to the audience, projected images, discordant music and lighting, and disconnected episodes to frustrate the viewer's expectations for simple entertainment. This "theater of illusions" (as anti-realists such as Brecht termed it) allowed the audience to comfortably and passively view a production without being changed by it. It was Brecht's intention to use drama to invoke social change, to shake his audiences out of their complacency and expect more from the theater than entertainment.
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