Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...simultaneously involving and distancing the audience, Nickleby embraces and reconciles many theatrical modes?realism and impressionism, the medieval pageant and the Victorian theater, Brecht and the Living Theater?while telling Dickens' story with enough conviction to make the fine hairs stand up on every playgoer's neck...
Sure, the playwright was penning propaganda to some extent (as we find in plenty of great drama from the 15th-century Everyman through much of Ibsen to most of Brecht). But he was also doing a good deal more, for Shakespeare is rarely as simple as he is often made out to be. There are ironic subtexts in the play; and the dramatist includes inglorious aspects of war as well as unbecoming traits in Henry's character. The Bard gave us something far more complex than a cardboard king of diamonds, as more and more people are coming to realize...
JUNGLE OF CITIES by Bertolt Brecht...
Jungle of Cities gestates the propositions that later became Brecht's babies. Mammon is God. Men and women buy, sell and devour one another, and freedom and free will are mocking mirages. The bleak isolation of existence governs all: "If you stuff a ship with human bodies till it bursts, there will still be such loneliness in it that one and all will freeze...
...Brecht never underestimated the latent power of masochism. One can only kick a stone so many times before one breaks one's toe. Shlink, a wily masochist, turns over his lumber plant to Garga and thus entraps him. Garga must now buy and sell not only lumber but human beings. Shlink and Garga exchange fortunes, trying to out-toy fate. Unfortunately, Director David Jones understresses the Rimbaud-Verlaine love-hate homosexual bond, which is at the core of the drama. At play's end Shlink takes his own life with a vial of poison, and Garga moves...