Word: brecht
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GALILEO, by Bertolt Brecht, is like a formal ballet of the mind in which the prince of science and the princes of the church dance out their accustomed roles. Anthony Quayle makes diction a diadem, as he leads the Lincoln Center Repertory Company through a highly creditable production...
...movie directing, best remembered for 1925's Street Without Joy, a grindingly realistic study of post World War I Vienna with a then unknown actress named Greta Garbo, 1925's Secrets of a Soul, the first film on psychoanalysis, and 1931's movie version of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera; of coronary embolism; in Vienna...
Dean Gitter, who plays The Boss, has molded a character that is at once Brecht, Boss, and audience. His reactions to the events of the play -- to the East German workers' uprising -- are camouflaged with wit and contempt for three full acts. We can detect little going on in his mind, save reflex action, but we are nonetheless forced into the same chair in which he sits, to consider the same events with the same condescending ambivalence. In the fourth act, when the uprising is over and The Boss at last permits himself to respond -- to its "defeat...
...absorbing the events of which he has chosen not to be part. Yet Gitter's detached performance is a masterpiece of contradiction. With small, restrained gestures, and occasional movements of the mouth with and without voice, he echoes and narrates the production. Physically he has come as close to Brecht as his appearance permits, but he is never even tempted toward mimicry, and the potentially cheap laughs of recognition which accompany his entrance are wisely not bid for again...
Plebeians is about playwrights and artists as a lot, so it doesn't really matter if neither Brecht nor the East Berlin uprising was in fact what Grass recreates. Like The Boss, he is snatching a bit of history and reworking it for his own ends. And his justification can be found in The Boss as well, to whom history is fantasy and the present is fact. Brecht -- politically disappointed with pre-war Germany and post-war America--meets the present for one last time in the German Democratic Republic. Finally perceiving the incongruity of his politics within and without...