Word: brechtian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This first Broadway production suggests the stature of the play without fully measuring up to it. Anne Bancroft is more often the folksy Bronx matriarch than the flinty earth mother. Straining for Brechtian detachment, Director Jerome Robbins achieves a kind of laconic toughness in which the actors hold back, rather than banish, their tears. This misses Brecht's sense of the dire human predicament too deep for tears. Brecht tended to use sex for comic relief, but Barbara Harris' sly burlesque of a prostitute is the wrong kind of funny for this play. Eric Bentley's translation...
Robert Penn Warren is an accomplished novelist, but a poor playwright. His stage version of ALL THE KING'S MEN, which is made of snippets from the book, could be called Brechtian if it were at all successful, but it isn't. Instead, all its hundreds of tine little scenes misfire, and its connective device of a nagging professor, brought in as a foil to Jack Burden, the novel's narrator, simply irritates. The whole thing resembles nothing so much as a College Outline of the book, and only serves to remind one of how very good the book...
Chris Hobson, who plays a Brechtian sage and narrator whom Gardner has rather artificially grafted on to his plot, is properly stilted, abstract, and didactic, but he seems totally out of place. This role should...
...loses her two other children, too (one of them is a symbolically mute daughter, another Brechtian figure of innocence), and Mother Courage trudges on, to one of the author's haunting pieces of doggerel...
...Critic Kenneth Tynan wonders whether Brechtian drama "is a gigantic tribute to motherhood." Brecht's men are usually drunks, cynics or compromisers, his heroines "mostly instruments of salvation . . . Did Brecht, as rumor insists, spurn his father and worship his mother? If so, it supports the old hypothesis that the men who adore their mothers lean toward the Left, while those who idolize their fathers lean toward the Right." Whether or not Tynan is correct about Brecht, he certainly has the makings of a fascinating psychological parlor game...