Word: brecht
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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...
...when Tandy, an actress of indelible grace, reveals to Rose moments of tender and tantalizing intimacy with her late husband. The severest irritant in the play is Davies' use of Jackson as a narrator and monologuist addressing the audience directly. This is a drastic "alienation effect" for which Brecht himself would have disowned his disciples. For the rest, Jackson performs Herculean labors, but even Hercules was spared a 13th...
...sourfulness Elvis pours into it. "Clubland" is diverting but stupid, with a deadly, unexpansive chorus that endlessly rehashes a bottom-of-the-barrel pattern of notes. Which leaves, among other things, a nice, tinny, almost Brechtian exhortation to immorality in "Fish 'n' Chips Paper" (ironic, of course, but, unlike Brecht, pessimistic), and a delicate number called "Big Sister's Clothes" that exemplifies the change in Elvis's thinking...