Word: schweyk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SCHWEYK IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR is not altogether unlike the Good Soldier Schweik of W.W.I, but Bertolt Brecht made him a subject of even broader comedy. Woodstock...
...prove literally disarming, especially if touched by a new spirit of community. This is an extremely attractive premise, and the production earns credit as fine didactic theatre: tonic but never argumentative. But it is also an important premise, and an arguable one. Like all didactic art, this Schweyk must stand on the force with which it advances its object lesson, and its simple success as theater...
...often plagued by underrealized staging. Much of the politically cheering impact of this production derives directly from its 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...
...energy. There results a sense of restrained favor in the playing which makes up for occasional lapses in comic timing. A great deal of good-natured conviction appears on stage inSchweyk, and from the standpoint again of didactic theater, nothing is so important as this. John Tatlock as Schweyk and Gerard Shepherd as his gluttonous companion Baloun are admirable, though I wished in each case for certain qualities of size, and especially of what can only be called earthiness--which only actors of considerably more age and experience can be expected to convey. Among the ladies, Jan Gough does especially...
With all its contributing sources of energy and intelligence, this Schweyk advances its premise farther than any overview of the text might suggest would be possible. The amount of didactic mileage concealed in a series of simple comic vignettes pitting a group of small-time Czechs against a team of penny Nazis is something to experience for oneself. Though it may not finally upset one's faith in the Kafka version, this production will give that faith a thoroughly healthy shaking-up. That much, at least, I think we deserve...