Daring to Play

A Brecht Companion

Manfred Wekwerth, Anthony Hozier, Rebecca Braun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136709104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Translated into English for the first time, Daring To Play: A Brecht Companion is the study of Bertolt Brecht's theatre by Manfred Wekwerth, Brecht's co-director and former director of the Berliner Ensemble.

Wekwerth aims to challenge prevailing myths and misconceptions of Brecht's theatre, instead providing a refreshing and accessible approach to his plays and theatrical craft. The book is rich in information, examples and anecdotal detail from first-hand acquaintance with Brecht and rehearsal with the Berliner Ensemble. Wekwerth provides a detailed practical understanding of how theatre operates with a clear perspective on the interface between politics and art.

Warm and engaging, whilst also being provocative and challenging, Daring to Play displays the continued vitality of Brecht's true approach to theatre makers today.

1

BRECHT’S THEATRE

An Extended Overview

Taken together, the three articles in this part – all of them extended lectures – form more than half the book, and the longest of these by far is the first, ‘Brechtian Theatre Today’, the Stockholm Seminar. This is one of the most sustained and comprehensive single accounts that Manfred Wekwerth has written about Brecht. Dating from the late 1970s, it appears here substantially revised. Of the other two pieces, ‘Brecht’s Simplicity’ was written for a conference in 2006, and ‘Brechtian Theatre – an Opportunity for the Future?’ – though parts date back to the late 1990s – was primarily written for a theatre colloquium in Cuba in 2004. These pieces have been grouped together because they provide an overview of Brecht and a detailed discussion of key aspects of his work. All three reflect Wekwerth’s review of Brecht in the light of the changes following 1989 and the crisis that has overtaken capitalist economies since 2007.

The ‘Stockholm Seminar’ begins with a brief Marxist analysis of capitalism. However, recognizing that Brecht’s Marxism is an integral element of his approach, Wekwerth bases his commentary on the economic and political insights of, not so much the failed institutional Marxism of the GDR, but the liberating Marxism and socialism of a variety of thinkers from Benjamin and Gramsci to Habermas, Chomsky and Brecht himself. Wekwerth takes the prevailing myths and misconceptions about Brecht and systematically disposes of them. He then sets out to explain what Brecht was really doing. His account of Brecht’s theatre is then enhanced by inclusion of personal memories of his experience of working with Brecht himself. He demonstrates that Brecht’s theatre is not a matter of now all-too-familiar techniques but a critical and playful attitude and an engaging way of challenging and questioning our own changing world.

Readers interested in Brecht’s practice will find that he provides useful explanations of some key aspects such as the following:

• the relationship to Stanislavski’s approach to acting

• ‘naivety’ and Brecht’s ‘philosophical folk theatre’

• taking a critical stance or attitude (‘kritische Haltung’)

• showing the world as changing and changeable

• developing the ‘Not-But’ in events and the prompting of alternatives

• Verfremdung and Verfremdungseffekt – the technique of ‘making things strange’

• historicization, and developing the tension between actuality and the fictional analogue

• developing the Fabel, the story-telling dramaturgy

• the principle of ‘one-thing-after-another’

• the Gestus of showing and what is shown

• dialectical thinking – seeking and highlighting contradictions

• the active role of the spectator

• the politics of theatre

• and, above all, pleasure, playfulness and enjoyment – and the value of comedy.

These aspects are explained, not in isolation, but as part of Brecht’s whole approach to theatre.

AH

BRECHTIAN THEATRE TODAY

An Attempt in Seven Days

Stockholm seminar¹

Day one

‘Brechtian Theatre Today’ – I don’t much like this title (even though I approved it). It’s a title that doesn’t see fit to ask what exactly Brechtian theatre is. Often enough ‘Brechtian theatre’, which everyone thinks they know plenty about, is considered a question of social conscience, fashion, or taste, but not a scholarly concept.² Yet again, the scholarly language to talk about theatre is missing. Indeed, most theatre practitioners refuse to talk about theatre in theoretical terms, just as lyric poets are upset if you talk objectively about lyric poetry, and not lyrically. The logical consequence of this would be that in order to talk about operas you have to sing. So we really do need some theoretical concepts in order to understand what we are doing when we engage in theatre, and why what we are doing gives other people pleasure. The theoretical concepts we use might not be entirely free from contradictions, but they at least should not be made to mean the exact opposite of themselves. That begins with the concept ‘Brechtian theatre’. Like so many things today, it has been sorely abused by creative writers and critical commentators. For one group, Brechtian theatre is the trite problem-solver of past times, when there was still hope for the future; for the other it already is this hoped-for future. Both are equally off the mark. They are mere speculations.

First: Brechtian theatre, before it is anything else, is theatre. Not just a specific theatre that only produces works by Brecht, but – as should be the case for a ‘proper’ theatre – a theatre that seeks to entertain its audience with everything that world literature can offer.³ When Brecht returned from exile to Berlin at the end of 1948 and began writing theatre once more, people expected him, in the light of ‘the rubble not just on the ground but also in everyone’s heads’, to produce Lehrstücke (learning plays), similar to his work from the 1930s, where pedagogy was substituted for pleasure. Brecht himself had contributed to this with his radical polemic against ‘the culinary’. The Short Organum for the Theatre, written shortly before his return to Berlin, begins however with the following words:

Let us therefore cause general dismay by retracting our intention to emigrate from the realm of the pleasing and let it be known, to even more general dismay, that we are planning to settle in this very realm. Let us treat theatre as a place of entertainment, as is only right when debating aesthetics, and examine what kind of entertainment most appeals to us.

In Brecht’s theatre there will not be any pedagogical instruction that isn’t entertaining. No philosophy that isn’t enjoyable, and no politics without pleasure. Pleasure not just in the light-hearted, but also, as Schiller had already envisaged, in the tragic too. While working in 1953 on Erwin Strittmatter’s comedy Katzgraben, the first ‘contemporary play’ produced by the Berliner Ensemble and which describes the history of a GDR village at the time of the land reform, Brecht went one step further:

It is not asking enough when one only asks of theatre that it provide realizations, insightful representations of reality. Our theatre must inspire joy in the act of realization, guide people’s pleasure in changing reality. Our audience must not merely hear how Prometheus is freed from his chains, they must also be schooled in the joy of freeing him. All the joys and pleasures experienced by inventors and discoverers, the liberators’ sense of triumph, these must be taught by our theatre.

If you look through Brecht’s texts with an eye not to the content but to statistical probability, that is to say not considering what they mean but how often individual words appear in them, you will make a curious discovery: ‘recognizing’, ‘changing’, ‘producing’ seldom appear on their own. Mostly you will read: ‘the joy in recognizing’, ‘the passion in producing’, ‘the fun in changing’, ‘the wit in making aboutturns and jumps’, ‘the gratification in discovering and inventing’, ‘the pleasure in the instability of things’. These concepts – pleasure, joy, gratification, fun – tend to be overlooked or consciously omitted. Because they correspond better to the false image of Brecht the rationalist, ‘pure’ productivity, ‘pure’ realization, ‘pure’ thought are adhered to – without the theatre. In one of the last conversations I had with him in autumn 1956, Brecht complained that people don’t approach his theatre naively. Rather, they view it as ‘a means of producing ideas’, or ‘a place for trying out thought-experiments’, or even as a ‘political reform centre’. As if he wanted to replace feelings and fun in his theatre with thoughts and morals, and pleasure with pedagogy. Or indeed theatre with scientific discourse. He claimed to have had recourse to science in order to help theatre become more theatrical, and with that more enjoyable, something which – in Brecht’s opinion – had got lost in bourgeois theatre. He felt that bourgeois theatre – admittedly with a number of major exceptions – was increasingly engaging in phoney substitutes. It was replacing art with artifice, storms with storms in a teacup, and catharsis, so important to everyone, was in reality now just a cheap massage of the soul. Out of variety had come a superabundance, stories were interpreted before they had even been told, and everywhere an arty sense pregnant with presentiment was covering up meaningless nonsense. Shakespeare too eventually turned to scholarship in order to find his way back to strong stories that would actually interest people and were no longer being delivered by the court theatre.

Certainly in Shakespeare’s day Plutarch, for example, was translated into English for the first time and Shakespeare used his The Lives of Great Greeks and Romans directly as the basis for his plays Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, passionate pamphlets about the value and danger of great men in history. Or let’s take the example of the philosopher Thomas More, author of Utopia and a contemporary of Shakespeare. His biography of King Richard III (a falsification, incidentally) was used by the young Shakespeare immediately after its publication for his work The Life and Death of King Richard the Third, probably one of his most influential plays. And Brecht likewise used for his theatre the scholarship of his time, which was influenced by the natural sciences, economics, behavioural research, linguistics, but above all the dialectics of Hegel and Marx. The philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug⁴ is even of the opinion that it was his engagement with scientific discourse, in this case Marxism, that allowed Brecht to overcome, also with regard to his literary output, the crisis of his individual antibourgeois protest which had run its course by the mid-1920s. Brecht appears to confirm this thesis in an entry to his work notebooks from 1928: ‘When I read Marx’s Capital, I understood my plays.’ So Brecht was not interested – contrary to all rumours – in making theatre more academic, or more political; rather, he wanted to make more theatre. More specifically, he wanted to return to great theatre – with the help of scholarship and politics. He wanted to return to enjoyment.

‘Enjoyment’ is something that those on the political Left have only ever spoken about occasionally, and then with some embarrassment, because they consider enjoyment to be a luxury, and luxury to be a bourgeois excess. The 1968 revolutionaries went even further: they cast out aesthetics of any description as complicit with the ‘repressive tolerance’ with which they claimed the bourgeoisie tried to divert attention from the contradictions of reality. They went so far as to demand a ‘revolutionary ban on culture’, which was supposed to counter the ‘autonomy of the cultural’. The aim was to say what had to be said in an ‘elementary’ fashion, without ‘trivializing it through the transformations of art’. Yet enjoyment is one of the founding precepts of Marxism. A Marxism, however, that stems from Marx and which Brecht strictly differentiated from ‘Murxism’,⁵ which was also popular in the GDR: ‘Marxism, in its current widespread form of Murxism, is terrible because it makes asses unbeatable in debate’. Enjoyment can be found in Marx where you would least expect it: in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Here Marx argues that man’s purpose isn’t to produce, but rather that the purpose of all production is man alone. Man, in his ‘conscious everyday activity’, is the sole purpose of this activity. He isn’t working for a higher being, nor does a higher being work him. He works for himself, and with this he also produces himself. And because man, through his activity as a social being, produces himself as he develops, he produces – without knowing or wanting to – precisely those ‘higher beings’ who reign over him and whom he has to serve ‘in Heaven as on earth’. In reality however, Marx claims, it is man himself who makes ‘God in his own image’. But in order to realize this, a long evolution across history is necessary. Marx believes that if man is to conceive of himself as a ‘higher being’ and use this realization to his advantage, then enormous ‘efforts within society’ are necessary, ultimately ‘revolutionizing society from the bottom up’. Only in this manner can be formed the ‘associations of free producers’, which, by socializing the means of production, overcome the absurd contradiction of capitalism which allows communal production on the one hand and private ownership on the other. With this, the false belief that man is from birth onwards the subject of some kind of ‘higher being’ would also be rejected. The condition for realizing this state of affairs and putting such knowledge to good use is a ‘general equality’ between people. Not, Marx warns, in order to make everyone the same (as is usually suspected), but to give them the same chances. For social equality does not mean making people the same and eradicating their individuality (as is repeatedly claimed). On the contrary. ‘Only when everyone is standing on the same footing can differences become apparent’, Brecht writes in his Me-Ti: Book of Changes. Extending an individual’s social relations, precisely by enabling equal opportunities, also extends his scope for personal fulfilment. Marx writes in the Contribution:

And so the old understanding, whereby man, in whatever narrow-minded national, religious, or political context he places himself, appears to be the purpose of production, may seem considerably superior to the modern world, where production now appears to be the purpose of man, and wealth the purpose of production. But if we look beyond the narrowminded bourgeois context, what is wealth other than a universality of needs, skills, pleasures, and the productive capacities of individuals that is attained through universal exchange?

Marx valued enjoyment (and more precisely ‘human’ enjoyment, which he distinguished from the ‘primitive’ or ‘that of beasts’) as something essential to man, something that ultimately makes man man. Enjoyment for Marx allows man self-affirmation. Or as he puts it: ‘self-affirmation as man’s sensual appropriation of his humanity’. Man recognizes himself in the works he has created and enjoys his ability to realize himself in objects. This differentiates him from a purely ‘natural being’, such as an animal, which in order to survive has to adapt to its environment and in so doing develops extensive adaptational skills. The philosopher Wolfgang Harich⁶ writes:

Man is not just biologically but above all historically conditioned. The more he produces, the more he loses his natural ability to adapt to his environment and, as a result of this ‘biological deficiency’, is forced to create a ‘cultural environment’ for himself. [I like the tangible scope of the concept ‘culture’ as it is used here, MW.] Man as a historical being does not adapt to his natural environment, but instead he changes it (whereby of course he never stops being a part of nature). And as he changes the world, he changes himself. For every appropriation is also always a production. Satisfying his needs, man constantly creates new needs. This is interesting: Marx does not consider man’s first historical deed to have been the satisfaction of pre-existing needs, but rather the creation of new ones.

And Wolfgang Harich, whom I particularly admire, even suggests that man is faced only with the alternative ‘create more, or perish’.

However, in the ‘pre-history of man’ (Wolfgang Harich), in the greatest part of our history, therefore, during the course of which man and his labour eventually become commodities in their own right, the results of man’s own work strike him as independent objects that remain foreign to him. This puzzling interpretation, which people were long at a loss to explain without mystifying it, was revealed by Marx to be a decisive phenomenon in social systems that are based on the production of commodities, including therefore today’s capitalism. In the first volume of Capital he calls this ‘commodity fetishism’. In taking on the form of a commodity, products created by one’s own hand are no longer available for personal use, because their purpose is solely to be used by others, with whom they will be exchanged. The value of a commodity therefore does not emerge in its use but rather through exchange alone. However, those involved in the exchange experience this value, the product purely of human activity (production, exchange), as a quality of the work itself, just as it is a quality of sugar, for example, to be sweet. In today’s bourgeois economy there is even such a thing as a ‘pancake theory’. According to this, the value of a commodity is in the commodity itself, just as the sweet filling is in the pancake. With this, the relationship between people, production, and the act of exchange is ‘objectified’. Something that man made by his own hand denies its human provenance: it becomes a fetish. These inverted relationships lend the fruits of human work a – as Marx terms it – ‘ghostly objectivity’. And he writes: ‘In this quid pro quo (exchange), the products of work become commodities, tangible, intangible or social objects [ … ]. Nothing more than the specific social circumstances of man himself are in evidence here, but they take on the illusory form of a relationship between objects.’

Yes, the product of man gains power over man, as can easily be seen today in the totalitarian reign of capital finance, also known as ‘the finance bubble’. It is capital’s leap of faith towards complete independence, that absurd ‘upswing’ into the unreal, where man for a time can make more profit than is actually produced. Bankers, once the economy’s servants, uncouple themselves from the ‘real’ economy and are able as speculators to turn even ‘normal’ capitalists into their disciples. Enormous profits derived from speculating bring in ‘fictive capital’ that is superimposed over the ‘real economy’ like ‘finance bubbles’, the economy becomes ever more heated as profits are made to bring in more profits, until eventually it bursts along with the bubble. It is absurd: even as it delivers an ‘outstanding performance’, capital devalues itself. Successes create crises. Capital is admittedly able to learn, but it is beyond instruction in this respect. Or as a clever economist expresses it (such a thing does still exist today): ‘Capitalism shows itself to be meaningful on the small-scale and meaningless on the large-scale’ (P. A. Baran⁷). Even though capitalism may appear perfectly rational in individual cases, it plays out an irrational cycle time and time again. Thus the next crisis follows on from the last. But this powerful capital, in whatever for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction by Anthony Hozier
• Note on Text and Translation
• Preface by Manfred Wekwerth
• 1. Brecht’s Theatre – An Extended Overview
• 2. Political Perspectives
• 3. Theatre Making – The Fabel
• 4. Two Speeches – Two Moments of Change
• 5. Enjoying the Final Fruits
• Notes
• Manfred Wekwerth Chronology and Key Publications
• Further Reading
• Index