Word: brecht
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...Bertolt Brecht had a touching Teutonic faith in the power of the blow to instruct. Almost all his dramas are displays of belligerent didacticism. The stage was his prize ring. The audience was his sparring partner. There he was-"poor B.B.," as he always liked to think of himself-lashing out with a bruising ideological left to the midriff, jolting the playgoer with some brisk truism...
Minnesota Theatre Company--A limited New York engagement of the Tyrone Guthrie company in two productions--a controversial adaptation of the "Orestia" called "House of Atreus" and George Tabori's translation of Brecht's "Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui," which shows the Nazis as Chicago gangsters. At the BILLY ROSE, W. 41st...
...consider the alternative. In the extremely informal comfort of an Eliot House main dining room spotted with wrestling mats, army blankets, cushions and chairs, the next weekends offer a free, funny, and frequently poignant update on Hasek, in the form of a rare English language production of Bertolt Brecht's Schweyk in the Second World War. An update it is, for in his telling epilogue to the production, translator Charles Sabel would have it emphasized that even for folk heroes times change...
Hasek's Schweyk was an Austro-Hungarian Imperial recruit whose very literal-minded obedience proves the bane of his superior officers. By the time of the Second War, Schweyk's position has become more complicated, and Brecht's hero has as more difficult task; a civilian now, he juggles the roles of partisan and seeming colla-borator. He still feeds his friends, still rattles military authority, still tries to stay alive, but there is somewhat less call on his innocence, somewhat more on his cunning. Brecht's Schweyk is already a conscious, canny resister. Nor does the progress end there...
...humor, as further embodied in Mr. Sabel's fine-sounding translation, which provides a good deal of sharp comic dialogue and worthy black-out lines for the vignettes of Schweyk in action. In rendering the songs which highlight many scenes, the translation achieves where many English treatments of Brecht fail; the lyrics retain a cutting edge but never overstep the limits of the playwrignt's delicate ironic sense to make the point. This discipline is another necessary element of good didactic theater...