Word: farquahr
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Trumpets and Drums is an adaptation of George Farquahr's The Recruiting Officer, written in 1706. The play was an ideal vehicle for Brecht to tinker with, for the conventions of Restoration comedy his theatrical purposes perfectly. His dream of a didactic theatre, where audiences could watch plays detachedly and learn from them, was spoiled on occasion by audiences that emotionalized over his characters. He rewrote the last scene of Mother Courage so that audiences would be disgusted as his heroine, he children all killed by the war, picked up her wagon and went off following the soldiers...
...Farquahr, however, made no pretense of "character development." The figure in his comedy are caricatures, and no audience can romanticize a caricature--they are human alienation effects. So Brecht can show us his Plumes and Melindas for scene after scene, but leave one free of emotional attachments to them. When a devastating final scene shows the county bourgeois entertaining themselves while thet poor are led off to fight in America, no emotional tie to any of the characters prevents you from condemning them if you choose to. Thus Trumpets and Drums succeeds in doing what Brecht...
...Farquahr's plot was concerned with a captain and a sergeant who try to recruit a company of soldiers in the country town of Shrewsbury during the War of the Spanish Succession. Brecht changed the time to 1776; his Captain Plume is the hero of Bunker Hill (he won the battle by cutting open a dike so that the American "dirt farmers" fled to try to save their fields). He and Sergeant Kite are unable to recruit men successfully by legal means; they try various tricks and finally resort to a morality campaign which "cleans up" Shrewsbury by having...
Mark Bramhall and Marjorie Lerstrom drew the two roles most chopped up by the crossfire between Brecht and Farquahr. Farquahr's Worthy is an amorous country gentleman of leisure and a bit of a buffoon; Brecht's is a shoe merchant who plans to sell his boots to the platoon Plume recruits, and his mental temperature oscillates between extremet canniness and extreme romanticism. Bramhall might have made the role gell a bit better by treating some of Worthy's protestations as posturing. Miss Lerstrom faces the same problem with Melinda and resolves it by throwing herself vigorously into the lady...
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