Word: brecht
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Died. Helene Weigel, 70, Vienna-born actress-director and flinty widow of Playwright Bertolt Brecht; in East Berlin. Already an accomplished performer when she married Brecht in 1929, Weigel later starred in his drama Mother Courage on the Berlin stage. Anti-Nazi and proCommunist, the couple fled Hitler's Germany in 1933, lived in Denmark and the U.S., then returned to East Germany after the war. For the past 15 years Weigel directed the famed Berliner Ensemble, the repertory company founded by Brecht. "What Brecht prescribed," wrote Critic Kenneth Tynan in 1961, "his widow embodies: the maxim that there...
...Radical Separation of Elements: Solanas' total dialectical form consists of universal internal contradiction, with no element allowed to stand unchallenged, similar to the theatrical form Brecht often referred to as "the great struggle for supremacy between words, music, and production." La Hora de los Hornos builds its total analysis of class conflict from a heterogeneous mass of small "cells" or "acts," each of which invents its own peculiar camera-style in contrast to that of its brothers. And within each cell images and sounds struggle within themselves and with each other: dialectics within dialectics. Tracks of the countryside are intercut...
...Jungle of Cities presents yet another problem to those who would apply political criteria to Brecht. Many of his early plays were condemned by the Left for what seemed to be a conviction that a bureaucratic capitalism will, in the end, win out. Jungle is a play which does not provide clear alternatives of good vs, evil, left vs, right, but rather shows a pair of opponents both of whom are unlikable, racist, capitalist, and generally unseemly...
...PANTHEON edition containing the first four long plays and five one-act plays, is the first volume of a projected complete English edition of all of Brecht's writings. It is based on the German Gesammelte Worke of Brecht, and contains variant readings for all the plays, as well as the author's notes on the performance, conception, and meaning of each play. The plays have been translated by a number of people, and the quality of the translations is vastly uneven. William Smith and Ralph Manheim, who translated Baal, Drums in the Night, and The Life of Edward...
...plays, are entirely worth reading. While maintaining fidelity to the original, they have been put into a relatively artful English, one which is both readable and, I think, performable. In any case, Pantheon is to be congratulated for finally undertaking to produce a complete critical edition of Brecht, something this country has been lacking for years...