Bertolt Brecht Collected Plays: Eight
The Antigone of Sophocles, The Days of the Commune, Turandot or The Whitewashers’ Congress
Volume Eight of Brecht’s Collected Plays contains his last completed plays, from the eight years between his return from America to Europe after the war and his death in 1956. Brecht devoted his energies at this time to the establishment of a new, post-fascist literature and theatre. He founded the Berliner Ensemble with his wife, Helene Weigel, and created models of production practice for future generations.
Brecht’s Antigone (1948) is a bold adaptation of Hölderlin’s classic German translation of Sophocles’ play. A reflection on resistance and dictatorship in the aftermath of Nazism, it was also a radical new experiment in epic theatre. The play was first staged in Switzerland, in collaboration with associates from the pre-Nazi years and the production formed the basis for Brecht’s first Model-Book.
The Days of the Commune, a semi-documentary account of the Paris Commune of 1871, was originally planned to be the first production by the new Berliner Ensemble in 1949. Partly for political reasons, it was not in fact premièred until after Brecht’s death. His most serious and ambitious historical play, it sticks closely to the historical sources; ideologically, it is an exercise in thinking beyond defeat.
In Turandot or the Whitewashers’ Congress, Brecht returned to a long-running plan to write a grand satire of the bourgeois intellectual class. He developed a bizarre comic variation on the old Turandot story, dressed up as a farcical review of the flailing left-wing intelligentsia of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi bureaucracy, the ineffectual anti-fascist exiles, and the calcified civil service of the young GDR. It was his last completed play.
The plays are accompanied by an introduction and notes by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine, including variants and relevant texts by Brecht.
Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg on 10 February 1898 and died in Berlin on 14 August 1956. He grew to maturity as a playwright in the frenetic years of the twenties and early thirties, with such plays as Man equals Man, The Threepenny Opera and The Mother. He left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933, eventually reaching the United States in 1941, where he remained until 1947. It was during this period of exile that such masterpieces as Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle were written. Shortly after his return to Europe in 1947 he founded the Berliner Ensemble, and from then until his death was mainly occupied in producing his own plays.
Other Bertolt Brecht publications by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
Brecht Collected Plays: One
(Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, The Life of Edward II of
England, A Respectable Wedding, The Beggar or the Dead Dog,
Driving Out a Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch)
Brecht Collected Plays: Two
(Man Equals Man, The Elephant Calf, The Threepenny Opera,
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins)
Brecht Collected Plays: Three
(Lindbergh’s Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said
Yes/He Said No, The Decision, The Mother, The Exception and
the Rule, The Horations and the Curiatians, St Joan of the Stockyards)
Brecht Collected Plays: Four
(Round Heads and Pointed Heads, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich,
Señora Carrar’s Rifl es, Dansen, How Much Is Your Iron?,
The Trial of Lucullus)
Brecht Collected Plays: Five
(Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children)
Brecht Collected Plays: Six
(The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,
Mr Puntila and His Man Matti)
Brecht Collected Plays: Seven
(The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweyk in the Second World War,
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Duchess of Malfi )
Brecht Collected Plays : Eight
(The Days of the Commune, The Antigone of Sophocles,
Turandot or the Whitewashers’ Congress)
Berliner Ensemble Adaptations – publishing 2014
(The Tutor, Coriolanus, The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen 1431,
Don Juan, Trumpets and Drums)
Brecht on Art and Politics (edited by Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles)
Brecht on Film and Radio (edited by Marc Silberman)
Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks – publishing 2014 (edited by
Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman)
Brecht on Theatre – publishing 2014 (edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn)
Brecht in Practice – publishing 2014 (David Barnett)
The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theatre (Ekkehard Schall)
Brecht, Music and Culture – publishing 2014 (Hans Bunge, translated by Sabine Berendse and Paul Clements)
Brecht in Context (John Willett)
The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (John Willett)
Brecht: A Choice of Evils (Martin Esslin)
Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life – publishing 2014 (Stephen Parker)
A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht (Stephen Unwin)
Bertolt Brecht
Collected Plays: Eight
The Antigone of Sophocles
translated by David Constantine
Original work entitled:
Die Antigone des Sophokles
The Days of the Commune
translated by David Constantine
Original work entitled:
Die Tage der Kommune
Turandot or The Whitewashers’ Congress
translated by Tom Kuhn
Original work entitled:
Turandot oder Der Kongreß der Weißwäscher
Edited and introduced by Tom Kuhn
and David Constantine
This volume, the last in the series of Brecht’s Collected Plays, is dedicated to the memory of John Willett, who initiated this edition and did more than any other to bring Brecht to the English language.
Contents
Introduction
Chronology
THE PLAYS
THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES
THE DAYS OF THE COMMUNE
TURANDOT OR THE WHITEWASHERS’ CONGRESS
NOTES AND VARIANTS
THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES
Texts by Brecht
Journal entries
Letter to Stefan Brecht
Draft of a Foreword, 1947
‘Antigone’
Masterful Treatment of a Model (Foreword to the Antigone-Model)
Bridge verses for Antigone
Notes on the adaptation, 1951
New Prologue to Antigone, 1951
Editorial Notes
Glossary of Mythological Names and Places
THE DAYS OF THE COMMUNE
Texts by Brecht
‘Soliloquy of an actress as she makes up’
Letters to Helene Weigel
Notes for the production
Notes on The Days of the Commune
The stage set
Editorial Notes
From the Last Scene of Nordahl Grieg’s Defeat
Chronology of the Paris Commune
TURANDOT OR THE WHITEWASHERS’ CONGRESS
Texts by Brecht
Journal entries
Additional scenes from the Turandot complex
Two songs from the Turandot complex
Preface to Turandot
Notes
Turandot and the intellect
uals
Remarks on Turandot
Tui sketches
Editorial Notes
Introduction
THE LAST PLAYS, 1948-56
The three plays in this volume date from the last years of Brecht’s life, when he returned from the United States and tried to establish a career in Europe once again. He had had six somewhat frustrating years in America, in which he had failed to make much impact where it might have mattered most to him - in Hollywood and on Broadway - and he had already started to plan his return by the end of 1946. His summons in the following year to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (investigating ’Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry’) can only have served to convince him that there was no future for him there. The day after testifying, on 31 October 1947, Brecht boarded a flight to Paris. A few days later he was on his way to Zurich, where he was hoping to stage Mr Puntila and his Man Matti at the Zurich Schauspielhaus (a theatre which had played an extraordinary role in keeping an oppositional German theatre alive during the Nazi years). ‘The old continent is shabby and impoverished,’ he wrote to Ruth Berlau, ’but I think you’ll like it, as I do. We’ll be able to work’ (Letters, p.440). Europe was clearing up after the war, and the competition between the Western powers and the Soviet Union for political influence over central Europe was in full swing. Germany was divided into four separately administered zones, its people exhausted and mistrustful - if also cautiously inquisitive for the European and American culture which they had been denied over the past dozen years. Brecht himself was stateless, a suspect subversive, but without much else of a reputation. Next to nothing of his writings since 1938 was published, and nothing was in print. There was a serious paper shortage. Many of the theatre buildings were in ruins. It was not going to be easy.
It is sometimes maintained that these last nine years of Brecht’s life were comparatively unfruitful, and it’s true, he wrote less than in the apparently far more difficult circumstances of exile in Scandinavia and the United States. On the other hand, whereas the plays he wrote for European and American exile were designed to be accessible to bourgeois audiences internationally, and have duly become popular theatrical hits, the three major plays of Brecht’s post-war years are, in their different ways, more uncompromising and more challenging works. The Antigone of Sophocles was conceived as a new experiment in the epic theatre, and is linguistically an extraordinary composition. The Days of the Commune is Brecht’s only real excursion in historical drama, an attempt to write an adequate Marxist account of a key moment in revolutionary history, and a huge play. And Turandot or The Whitewashers’ Congress is part of a grand satire of the bourgeois intelligentsia which engaged him intermittently for over twenty years. All three were important works for Brecht.
In other ways too, the years 1948 to 1956 were productive. Brecht had to establish a position in a German-speaking cultural context, in the institutions of the theatre, with the audiences and critics, and, in due course, with the cultural and political bureaucracies of the Soviet sector and subsequently the GDR (founded in 1949). Besides, one of his pre-eminent concerns was to consolidate his considerable achievements of the previous decades. He was extremely active in organising and promoting productions of his plays, visiting and corresponding with theatres all over Europe, offering opinions and advice. He prepared texts for publication, or re-publication, continuing the Versuche (Experiments) series of the pre-1933 years, and subsequently initiating a Collected Works edition. And he wrote new texts: poems (including the Buckow Elegies), prose sketches, political and cultural commentaries, and the all-important synthesis of his theoretical ideas in the Short Organum for the Theatre, his ‘description of a theatre for the scientific age’. Perhaps most importantly, in terms of Brecht’s subsequent reputation in the European theatre, he and Helene Weigel founded a theatre company, devoted to promoting Brecht’s own works, method and theatrical style, and schooling a whole new generation of directors and actors. Given the state of German theatre and cultural life after National Socialism, that entailed the rediscovery of a repertoire and a whole new justification of the social role of the theatre. It was no small undertaking.
In their different ways the three plays presented here were all conceived as contributions to that larger task: not just efforts to relaunch Brecht’s career, but investigations into the appropriate culture for a post-war, post-Fascist Europe.
Interestingly, given the debates at the time about the value of the cultural heritage, they all take some existing literary text as a basis or model. Turandot obviously has its roots in earlier versions of that story, even if it has become something rather different in Brecht’s hands; one might say that, in this case, the existing fable was a peg on which to hang a brand new drama with quite new concerns. The Days of the Commune is a more purposeful counter-design, provoked (as much as inspired) by Nordahl Grieg’s play about the Paris Commune, Defeat. Only the first of the three, Antigone, is akin to what one might normally understand as a conscientious literary adaptation. Brecht’s dramatic output is full of adaptations of some sort or another, derived from a startlingly wide range of sources. One of his enduring preoccupations was with the culture of the past, and the uses to which it could, and should, be put. It is a matter which becomes particularly urgent in these last years, partly as a consequence of that mission to rediscover the repertoire and to create a cultural tradition for a Germany after Nazism.
As editors, we have sought to maintain a distinction: between, on the one hand, plays, such as those of this volume, which were independent literary projects, initiated and undertaken by Brecht (abetted by the customary collaborators), and, on the other hand, the stage adaptations of the Berliner Ensemble, which are clear examples of teamwork by the directors and dramaturgs of the Ensemble, and in which Brecht’s own contribution, although he was the team-leader, may sometimes have been quite small. The Ensemble’s engagement with the repertoire, in critical dialogue with the culture of the past, is a separate, important strand in Brecht’s late work in the theatre.1
* * *
Arrived in Zurich, Brecht’s first real contact was with Caspar Neher, the old schoolfriend who had designed the sets for many of his most successful pre-1933 productions and who had stayed in Germany. Together (and with the Austrian composer Gottfried von Einem, and the dramaturg of the Schauspielhaus Kurt Hirschfeld, amongst others), they hatched a whole range of plans and re-established contact with an array of friends and colleagues in the theatre world. The letters and diaries of these first months back in Europe are bursting with names.
Amongst their initial schemes in 1947/48 were the translation back into German of the new version of Galileo, the productions of Puntila in Zurich and of Mother Courage in Berlin a year later, as well as various translations and productions in non-German-speaking countries. But the very first project came about rather more unexpectedly. In November 1947 Brecht chanced to meet Hans Curjel, a Berlin theatre director whom he had got to know in 1929, working on Mahagonny. Curjel immediately mooted the possibility of a new venture at the theatre in Chur, of which he was now director. Within a few weeks, Brecht and Neher had mapped out an adaptation of Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone and visited the old cinema in Chur which served as a theatre. In several ways, this must have seemed a return to the circumstances prior to 1933. It was to be Brecht’s first job as a director back in the professional German-speaking theatre, it marked the beginning of renewed collaboration with Neher (who did the costumes, stage set and more) and, perhaps most enticingly, it was to be Helene Weigel’s first real speaking part in ten years. Brecht was excited to be working in German again; the fact that this was a text which strained the language to its utmost merely added to the pleasure and the sense of importance (evidenced in the Journal entries quoted in the Notes). But the other great attraction was to be able to work experimentally again with his theories of epic and of Verfremdung. This is a play which employs a chorus and masks
, and a decisive amount of reported action. So it is significant that the practical work on the Antigone adaptation coincided with Brecht’s preparation of the summary of his theatre-theoretical ideas which became the Short Organum. One must imagine him working simultaneously on these projects.
After some postponements, the premiere of The Antigone of Sophocles came eventually on 15 February 1948. The attendance of friends and guests from Zurich and elsewhere ensured that Brecht’s return to German-language theatre enjoyed some resonance. All the same, it was not a great success. The production has retrospectively achieved a particular reputation by virtue of the painstaking documentation in text and photographs of the Antigone-Model (see pp.203-15), but at the time it saw only five performances, one a matinée in Zurich. Contemporary reviews praised the Prelude, set in Berlin in April 1945, for its compelling updating of the myth, and it was recognised that the epic presentation - the actors showing, rather than impersonating their roles - marked this out as a significant theatrical event. Nonetheless, the critics struggled with the text and with Brecht’s efforts to manoeuvre the story away from its familiar moral battleground (of individual conscience and the demands of the state). The publication a few months later of the Antigone-Model, including the complete play-text, was even more disappointing; only some five hundred copies were sold initially. There was to be just one further full production of the play in Brecht’s lifetime, in the small German town of Greiz in November 1951. This was understood as an opportunity to test out the model. Although the conclusions were again generally favourable, it was still a minor event in a decidedly modest theatre. The experience of Antigone may have been a crucial test for the participants, but it would take more than this to reestablish Brecht’s position. For the time being, he returned to the Short Organum and to Puntila, which had its opening night on 15 June 1948. Puntila was the fourth of his Scandinavian plays to have its premiere in Zurich, but it was the first which Brecht was to direct himself.
Brecht’s adaptation remains a fascinating chapter in the life of the Antigone story: a paradoxical attempt to rationalise and update the story according to Brecht’s own social philosophy (with none of the psychological baggage of other modern treatments of classical myth), while at the same time apparently allowing the extraordinary dramatic and poetic language of his predecessors (both Sophocles and Hölderlin) to derail his own project. It seems evident that his interest in the material was increasingly linguistic and theatrical, rather than moral or political. Besides, Brecht’s literary adaptations are seldom wholesale appropriations, designed to obliterate the original. Instead they seek, self-consciously, to allow the history of a text to show through, in order to imply the possibility of a future evolution too. For Greiz, Brecht deleted the ’Berlin 1945’ Prelude, with its powerful yet ambiguous invocation of anti-Fascist resistance, and replaced it with a speech (see ‘New Prologue’, p.218) which simply enjoins the audience to