Word: brecht
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...Although Brecht must be studied in the light of his politics, his ultimate success rests on his skill as a playwright. It is this which has established him as far superior to his contemporaries; men like Feuchtwanger and others, who shared his political views but not his talent...
...Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, Vol. 1 Pantheon...
...TEMPTING-and far too easy-to judge Brecht by political criteria, to praise or condemn him for his Marxist perspective. Brecht himself encouraged political judgements of his work, viewing his plays as vehicles for his repudiation of the bourgeois lifestyle. He writes of his first play, "Baal is a play which could present all kinds of difficulties to those who have not learned to think dialectically." Likewise, he repudiates the popular success of Drums in the Night because he felt that it was based on a bourgeois misunderstanding of his purpose: "... the people who were so wildly anxious to shake...
There are some immediate problems to an artistic critique of Brecht. The most difficult is his preoccupation with results and outcomes, to the exclusion of beginnings and motives, a preoccupation which separates him from the realists. This tendency is present in most of his early plays, especially Baal and In the Jungle of Cities, where the reader finds himself faced with characters and situations acting in a seemingly irrational, or at least inexplicable, manner. Brecht creates these situations to explore the possibilities they contain, not the motivations which led up to them. In the prologue to In the Jungle...
...whole, as a success-if only for this robust fusion of music and dramatic spectacle. In Sanders, the slide-show of period engravings and photographs should make the mise en scene more convincing-and, with a little more coordination of scene changes, less awkward. In any event, Brecht, Eisler, Lehrman and his company merit the whole University's attention. Tonight may be a sequel to the teach-in. It may be something more...