Word: brecht
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Somewhere in the commodious vaults where dwell the souls of playwrights dead and gone. Two figures, faces wreathed in mist, crouch over a chess table. After a time the vapours clear, and we see the faces of Bertolt Brecht and Henrik Ibsen. Brecht speaks first...
...BRECHT: But none the less Heinrich, lieber Heinrich it is an honor when they do your work, wherever, whenever. As for however, why that McBain youth meant no harm in adapting your Master Builder. He only meant, no doubt, to give the idiom a more modern ring, and to snip away that overgrowth of symbols. There are such a lot of symbols in the play, Heinrich...
...Lichtheim, to paraphrase Brecht, would have to sweat to get the common people into his book and he doesn't take the trouble. So history becomes the battle of great thinkers, each a bit self-conscious in this un-Hegelian day and age, looking over his shoulder now and again to see if the rude folk are in fact trailing along behind...
Leaning precariously on Pirandello and Brecht for his dramatic hocus and pocus, Heller has written a spoof of the old-fashioned war play or film. Before a precarious bombing mission, an Air Force captain (Stacy Keach) goads his squadron with poetic tunes of glory extrapolated from Kipling and Shakespeare. A corporal disappears in the first sortie and a sergeant is shot to death for refusing to go on a second. Heller indulges in hortatory asides to the audience: "Another young boy killed in a war and all of you just sit there." By the time the captain has to order...
...dramatic terms, Ghelderode is the antithesis of Brecht. Ghelderode trusted in instinct; Brecht worshiped intellect. Brecht called for a didactic theater of ideology; Ghelderode scorned ideologies and celebrated the theater of magic, spectacle and mystery. He saw all men divided and torn on a Manichaean battleground of darkness and light, flesh and spirit, and he never lost his conviction that they danced at the end of fate's string. If his plays are sometimes episodic and full of antic despair, they also display the probing gallantry of quests. Ghelderode could say with his hero in Christophe Colomb: "Farewell, America...