Word: brecht
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Yojimbo. A Japanese movie that really is great: a work by Akira (Rashomori) Kurosawa that seems no more than a bloody and hilarious parody of a Hollywood western but develops into a satire that can stand with the beastliest and best of Bertolt Brecht...
Hancock based his production on Brecht's original text written in the 1920's and adapted by Eric Bentley. Howard Taubman of the Times noted that "his (Bentley's) English accomplishes the feat of making Brecht seem at home among...
Hancock's production opened in New York one day after the well-established Living Theater (Connection) opened Man Is Man, also based on Brecht's play. The Herald Tribune called Hanoock's version "sound in wind and limb and ear and eye...serving not only Brecht but off- Broadway as well." The Living Theatre version was critialzed as a "flailing work, possessed neither of a design of its own nor, it is to be hoped, of Brecht...
Taubman observed that "under John Hancock's direction this production approaches the manner and mood of the Brecht Theater in East Berlin." The Hancock version is "tougher in texture, lighter in construction and more focused on dramatic drive than the Living Theater version...
...Brecht's sardonic point emerges with ferocious bitterness when the framework of theatrical hocus-pocus is followed firmly and thoroughly," Taubman summarized...