THEATRE
Self-evident
KENNETH HURREN
You will recall how the Inquisitor in Shaw's Saint Joan observed dryly to the Maid's clerical and military enemies, fearful that their victim would escape the stake, that their most invincible ally was the accused herself, who seemed determined to condemn herself every time she opened her mouth. Anti-Brechtians, tempted to blow their cool over the absurd respect that the late Bertolt commands in the woollier intellectual circles, may be similarly reassured. His reputation cannot forever withstand the evidence of his plays. As the works are, one by one, translated and produced for us, so the legend crumbles a little more.
At one time we took it all on trust from the fervent disciples who brought the good word from Germany: we had read of Brecht's sturdy opposition to Hitler, and of how he had confused the Congressional in- vestigators into subversive activity in post- war Hollywood, and we were thus predis- posed in his favour. His later failure to identify himself with the East German workers in the 1953 revolt against another form of tyranny rather blighted his image as a freedom fighter; but by that time, in any case, we had begun to harbour doubts about him as a playwright, for we had actually seen some of his plays. With the appearance of Man is Man at the Royal Court, the residual believers in his genius as either dramatist or philosopher must inevitably be further diminished.
Occasionally, in his ponderous Teutonic way—with everything underlined twice over for the benefit of the slow-witted peasantry to whom he seems principally to have ad- dressed himself—Brecht has made a valid, if simple, point. Man is Man lacks even this tedious virtue. What we have here is a fatuous parable—set. with crude insolence.
among British soldiers in Kipling's India—glibly purporting to demonstrate how easy it is to change not only a man's personality (timorous civilian packer becomes callous machine-gunner) but his whole identity. It is rarely possible to argue a general conclusion from a specific case; when there is no element of conviction in the specific case itself, the entire exercise becomes preposterous. The situation is fantasticated (it is 1925 but Victoria reigns), and the piece is directed as music hall, with Henry Woolf playing the diminutive central figure in Chaplinesque style; but since Brecht's humorous en- deavours would probably strike the 'Carry On' team as depressingly unsophisticated, the method is scarcely successful. Even the faith of those devotees who have been as ob- durate in their beliefs as flat-earthers will be hard put to survive this one.
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