The Berliner Ensemble
MOTHER COURAGE, THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE, TRUMPETS AND DRUMS, An adapta- tion of George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer—By Bertolt Brecht. (Palace.) We are all greatly in the debt of Mr. Daubeny for bringing three plays acted and produced by the Berliner Ensemble to London. Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle had already been seen at the Paris festival and are thus familiar to West European audiences. They are both by Brecht himself and are both chronicle plays in the Elizabethan sense of the word. Mother Courage deals with the trials of a bawdily indomitable old woman who sells comforts to the troops for the greater part of the Thirty Years War. The Caucasian Chalk Circle is' based on a couple of folk- tales—the judgement of Solomon and the Judge-for-a-day themes. Both are staged with great brilliance in the manner the company have made their own and acted with more unity and perfection of detail than we are accustomed to on stages where actors are rarely together for longer than the run of one play. Drums and Trumpets is not so original a work, but is an eigthteenth-century farce played as it should, be played with great gusto and rapidity. The adaptation, indeed, means that Farquhar's play may pretty well be dis- missed from the mind when discussing it, but it provided an excellent pastiche for all that— even if some of its anti-militarist points were rather obvious. In one sense it was a great deal more like The Threepenny Opera than the other two productions. Since I have not the space to do so this week, I propose to return to these plays next week, when I shall discuss the general question of Brecht's stage- craft and confute those critics who do not agree with me about its quality. Meanwhile I would most strongly advise anyone who is fond of the theatre to book seats at the Palace right away. They will see something they may never be able to see again : not good theatre— that expression has been made an insult recently—but great drama.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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