Word: puntila
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Brecht devoted much of his career to his ever-recurring contention that whatever decent impulses men have are frustrated by a social system based on inequality of income, and Puntila is a variation on this theme. But it is more cheerful than many of his works, since the emphasis is not so much on the system and the monstrous creatures which it makes of men, as on the abounding exuberance and health of the impulses it cannot entirely suppress. As Puntila gropes drunkenly toward the friendship of his hired man, and as the hired man gropes cockily toward the privy...
...Puntila is supposed to be a fine Falstaffian fellow when drunk, (he is usually drunk): ready to use his money and power to satisfy the human and animal urges of himself and his friends. It is only during his "attacks" of sobriety that he becomes cold, hard, selfish, and nasty--or, in a word, capitalistic. "Everybody gets along with Puntila," mutters Puntila, potted--but his drunk scenes are written in a vein of repetitive, magniloquent slobbery that makes him more unpleasant drunk than sober...
This harsh, shrill, constantly-hammering quality in Brecht's writing has led Alex Horn, who directed, to impose upon his cast a degree of rough broadness in their playing that they cannot convincingly sustain. Ray Reinhardt plays Puntila with considerable authority (he can actually look like a dying deer while somebody is telling him not to); Anne Meara as his daughter has a high-spirited charm that shines out of everything she does. But even they have strained and labored moments, and certain minor cast members have no moments of any other kind. John Lasell plays the hired man with...
...easy to spot what is wrong with Puntila, but the satisfactions of the evening, except for certain beautiful erotic-comic passages, are harder to pin-point. The play is based on a group of Finnish stories, and it manages to achieve a vaguely Finnish atmosphere: bracing and sparse. The series of unpretentious, easily-changeable settings (designed by Robert Skinner and Lorna Kreuger) have a good deal to do with this; the backdrops for successive scenes are frankly mounted on a large picture frame, and the effect is never more Brechtian than when substantial sections look as if they were made...
...always with Brecht, there is the sense of an original, individual talent, undiverted and uncompromising, stubbornly being true to itself. This sounds like a moral rather than an aesthetic virtue, but it insures that Puntila, though often repetitive and clumsy, sometimes even boring, is seldom commonplace...