Brecht was never inclined to see any of his plays as completely finished, and this volume collects some of the most important theatrical projects and fragments that were always to remain 'works in progress'. Offering an invaluable insight into the writer's working methods and practices, the collection features the famous Fatzer as well as The Bread Store and Judith of Shimoda, along with other texts that have never before been available in English. Alongside the familiar, 'completed' plays, Brecht worked on many ideas and plans which he never managed to work up even once for print or stage. In pieces like Fleischhacker, Garbe/Büsching and Jacob Trotalong we see how such projects were abandoned or interrupted or became proving grounds for ideas and techniques. The works collated here span over thirty years and allow the reader to follow Brecht's creative process as he constantly revised his work to engage with new contexts. This treasure-trove of new discoveries is also annotated with dramaturgical notes to present readable and useable texts for the theatre. The volume is edited by Tom Kuhn and Charlotte Ryland, with the translation and dramaturgical edition of each play provided by a team of experienced writers, scholars and translators.
This is a selection of the best of Brecht's poems and songs, combining private and public poems from all stages of an intense and turbulent life as well as the most popular lyrics from plays such as Mahagonny and Mother Courage.
Times Literary Supplement • Books of the Year ("The most generous available English collection of Brecht’s poetry.") A landmark literary event, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is the most extensive English translation of Brecht’s poetry to date. Widely celebrated as the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht was also, as George Steiner observed, “that very rare phenomenon, a great poet, for whom poetry is an almost everyday visitation and drawing of breath.” Hugely prolific, Brecht also wrote more than two thousand poems—though fewer than half were published in his lifetime, and early translations were heavily censored. Now, award-winning translators David Constantine and Tom Kuhn have heroically translated more than 1,200 poems in the most comprehensive English collection of Brecht’s poetry to date. Written between 1913 and 1956, these poems celebrate Brecht’s unquenchable “love of life, the desire for better and more of it,” and reflect the technical virtuosity of an artist driven by bitter and violent politics, as well as by the untrammeled forces of love and erotic desire. A monumental achievement and a reclamation, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is a must-have for any lover of twentieth-century poetry.
An exquisitely drawn exploration of three lost souls’ emotional terrain As night falls in the City of Belgium, three strangers in their late twenties—a most dangerous age—arrive at a popular restaurant. Jona is about to move away; he calls his wife, who’s already settled in Berlin, before trying to make plans with friends for one last night on the town. No one bites—they’re all busy or maybe they just don’t want to party—but he’s determined to make this night something to remember. Victoria is lively and energetic, but surrounded by friends and family who are buzzkills, always worrying about what is best for her. Rodolphe glumly considers his own misery and then suddenly snaps out of it, becoming the life of the party. The three careen through the city’s nightlife spots and underbelly, getting ever deeper in the messiness of human existence as they chase pleasure—or at least a few distractions from their daily lives. Each has a series of misadventures that reveal them to be teetering on the edge of despair, of destruction, of becoming the people they’ll be for the rest of their lives. The City of Belgium occupies a place between lucid dream and tooth-grinding nightmare.
The result of twenty-five years of research on three continents, Brecht and Company is a revolutionary portrait of one of the world's greatest theater artists -- and the people upon whom he built his reputation. A noted Brecht scholar, John Fuegi traces the evolution of Brecht's parasitic relationships and aggressive ambition through close analysis of diaries, letters, and drafts of the literary works, revealing a man who was personally dazzling, a genius at assembling and directing the plays created in his workshop, but ultimately lacking in literary stamina, for which he depended on his lovers. A landmark study about the life and times of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century theater, Brecht and Co. will forever change our understanding of Brecht and his oeuvre. "[An] enormous, fascinating biography." -- The New Yorker "One of the most important critical studies of the century." -- New York Magazine
Bertolt Brecht in Context examines Brecht's significance and contributions as a writer and the most influential playwright of the twentieth century. It explores the specific context from which he emerged in imperial Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as Brecht's response to the turbulent German history of the twentieth century: World Wars One and Two, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship, the experience of exile, and ultimately the division of Germany into two competing political blocs divided by the postwar Iron Curtain. Throughout this turbulence, and in spite of it, Brecht managed to remain extraordinarily productive, revolutionizing the theater of the twentieth century and developing a new approach to language and performance. Because of his unparalleled radicalism and influence, Brecht remains controversial to this day. This book – with a Foreword by Mark Ravenhill – lays out in clear and accessible language the shape of Brecht's contribution and the reasons for his ongoing influence.
In an unusual fiction about memoir, Andrew Steinmetz tells the story of his great-aunt Eva who performed in the first workshop production of Bertolt Brecht's masterpiece The Threepenny Opera, in 1928. Steinmetz takes the story back to Eva's childhood in Germany, with her invalid mother and domineering siblings. Her training as an actress began just after her graduation from high school, and her introduction to the philosophies of Brecht and his contemporaries soon followed. With the pronouncement of the family's Jewish origins, both Eva and her brother left Germany to escape Nazi rule, Eva eventually settling in Canada. In their sessions with the tape recorder running, we see Steinmetz's own life as it intersects with Eva's, and his changing perspective on her life and work. Tied together with threads of Brecht's play, Steinmetz presents a life lived as though the world were a stage. A fictional tribute, Eva's Threepenny Theatre is as much concerned with what happened as what might have or was imagined to have been. "I'd known Eva since childhood," says Steinmetz, "and always in the back of my mind was this story I'd heard about her and The Threepenny Opera. I didn't know much about Bertolt Brecht, initially, but in my early twenties I was a songwriter and one night while I was in the studio recording, I got to talking with the engineer and later he pulled out a record of Lotte Lenya singing 'Seeräuberjenny' and 'Kanonen-Song.' That was it. Lenya's kitsch and the killer instinct: Eva talked like that. The droll, aloof, harsh cabaret style is incredibly moving, to me at least, something which seems to work almost despite itself. It was easy to see Eva as a product of Weimar Germany, of that precise period evoked by these songs. So I guess the initial and strongest connection between the novel and Brecht was through the lyrics he wrote for this music. As a socialist playwright, Brecht wouldn't touch naturalism, seeing it as an endorsement of a bourgeois or genteel world view, and I have to say, as a writer, I could never approach writing a family memoir wearing a straight face. Eva was schooled in Brecht, and so it felt right that the novel's form would reflect that, and at the same time bring about some genre consciousness. I also wanted some sort of emotional arc despite putting up with ideas of alienation and detachment. If this makes it sound like I've been working at cross purposes for the past fifteen years, which is as long as I've been at it, then that's exactly right." This book is a smyth-sewn paperback. The text is typeset in Sabon and printed offset on laid-finish paper making (estimated) 256 pages trimmed to 5.3 × 8.5 inches, bound into a paper cover and enfolded in a letterpress-printed jacket.
Performing Brecht is an unprecedented history of the productions of Brecht's plays in Britain over forty years. Margaret Eddershaw surveys all aspects of Brecht in performance, from his methodologies to his place in postmodernist theatre and beyond. She focuses on key productions by directors including George Devine, Sam Wanamaker, William Gaskill, Howard Davies, John Dexter and Richard Eyre. Eddershaw also provides three in-depth case studies of productions in the 1990s, incorporating her own exclusive access to the rehearsals and in-depth interviews with directors and performers. The case studies are: * The Good Person of Sechuan, directed by Deborah Warner and starring Fiona Shaw; * Mother Courage, directed by Philip Prowse and starring Glenda Jackson; * The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Di Trevis and starring Antony Sher
Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks presents a selection of Brecht's principal writings for directors and theatre practitioners, and is suitable for acting schools, directors, actors, students and teachers of Theatre Studies. Through these texts Brecht provides a general practical approach to acting and to realising texts for the stage that crystallises and makes concrete many of the more theoretical aspects of his other writing. The volume is in two parts. The first features an entirely new commentated edition of Brecht's dialogues and essays about the practice of theatre, known as the Messingkauf, or Buying Brass, including the 'Practice Pieces' for actors (rehearsal scenes for classics by Shakespeare and Schiller). The second contains rehearsal and production records from Brecht's work on productions of Life of Galileo, Antigone, Mother Courage and others. Edited by an international team of Brecht scholars and including an essay by director and teacher Di Trevis examining the practical application of these texts for theatres and actors today, Brecht on Performance is a wonderfully rich resource. The text is illustrated with over 30 photographs from the Modelbooks.
