Contemporary Arts
Diable Au Corps
Now that the London season of the Berliner Ensemble is over, it is both possible and desirable for a critic in this country to estimate Brecht's place in the contemporary theatre a little more carefully than hitherto. Since the company from the Schiffbaudamm came to town prides have been falling over backwards in order not to give the impression of being carried away by this foreign stuff from beyond the Iron Curtain. We have been told that you can see a company like this any day at Strat- ford or the Old Vic (which seems to me quite untrue), that all this could be seen in the Twenties anyhow (which, if true, would be irrelevant) and that Brecht was in any case a Communist doctrinaire (which is true, but reposes on an insufficient study of his thought and by no means says everything). Let me begin by dispelling a few of the more obvious misunderstandings.
To begin with, 1 must repeat what I have said before that the prime merit of Brecht's drama is that it has le diable' au corps—the real devil and none of your West End imps. He was a poet, his use of language is poetic and he has all the coarseness necessary to a vigorous drama. He is not too well bred, in fact. Consider the scene of • Azdak and the innkeeper's daughter in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, when the drunken judge finds that she has not been raped, but is guilty of assault with a deadly weapon—her very shapely behind. Nobody here (apart from the Crazy Gang) talks about girls waggling their behinds any more. The blessed Lord Chamberlain has ended all that, and the only people who waggle successfully on our stage are the young men.
Well, this poetic coarseness is one reason for liking Brecht. Then there is the question of his philosophy of Ile, which, those not used to criticising poetry (and bow many dramatic critics are?) usually take from his prose utterances. In fact his poetry does depend on a dialectic, but a dialectic which is far from Marxist. There is a swing between the flowing and the static, between society in dissolution and lasting things like peasants and young love and the earth, between the artificial and the real, the rich and the poor. About all the transitory features of human life such as governments and wealth and culture, Brecht is an anarchist with an acute sense of how easily the decor can dissolve leaving strictly nothing. Before the eternal phenomena he displays an awe which is religious in character. Marxist explandtions arc not needed to criticise Mother Courage and it is a fallacy to imagine that a work of art necessarily means what its author says it means.
Now about Brecht's form of drama. This may quite simply be described as the Eliza- bethan chronicle play—I understand that be was, in fact, much influenced by the German baroque theatre of the seventeenth century, but the nearer comparison is easier—which simply presents itself as a slice of life, begin- ning at an arbitrary point in time and ending with the death of the chief protagonist,
whether king or conspirator. Mother Courage presents the palmary example of this form. It can be said that in this play no one scene is of greater importance than another. The effect is cumulative rather than convergent, and, instead of catastrophe, there is a gradual darkening of atmosphere throughout the play. What turns Mother Courage into a tragic figure (which, of course, this genre by no means requires) is her all too human failure to see the connection between her misfortunes and her failure genuinely to reject the war. It is a criticism that can be made of this kind of play that it is not sufficiently dramatic, that the symbolic intricacies of plot and sub-plot are lacking in it, but I fancy this is compen- sated by the highly unitary character of the main theme.
As to staging, Brecht's last plays from Galileo Geld onwards can hardly be called expres- sionist, nor can the style of production which we saw recently at the Palace Theatre. The whitish backcloth and the hard light, the toy izbas and wagons transported by the revolu- tions of the stage—these effects, make for a type of coarse bravura much in keeping with Brecht's language and thought. The famous alienation effect (if we must deal with that here) seems to me a deliberate attempt to reach that state noticed by Yeats when he remarked that at the height of tragedy we are conscious of a 'depersonalisation' in the characters affected. We do not think of them as people like ourselves (if we did, the effect produced would be pathos), but rather as the vehicles' of a sensation altogether beyond individual experience. It is this kind of heightening which I believe Brecht to mean when he speaks of the alienation effect, though a lot of what he has to say about it is a little contradictory. In any case, it is no invention, but something all great dramatists aim at. In Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle Brecht seems to me to achieve it.
These notes on Brecht's drama neglect many aspects of his work, In particular they neglect the fine interpretation it received by the actors of the Berliner Ensemble. I do not think that anyone who saw Helene Weigel as Mother Courage will easily forget her, and Ernst Busch' as Azdak was equal to the demands of a very far-ranging part (both of them, of course, were helped by looking like people and not like tailors' dummies). However, if in this short space it is possible to dispel some of the mystification surrounding Brecht's work (in which his admirers have not been entirely guiltless), this adumbration of an essay will have been worth while. Here we are dealing with one of the best and most complex talents that ever concerned itself with the stage, with the best dramatist of our time and one of the best producers. Is it too much to ask that, when critics talk of his work, they should take a little trouble and exercise as much com- mon sense .as they do, say, in anticipating the quirks of their various editors?
ANTHONY HARILLY
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