The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht

Willett, John

doi:10.5040/9781350054783

Cited by 40 publications

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“…Edward Gordon Craig himself contributed a Foreword to the English edition, in which he approves the designs but baulks noticeably at the left-wing politics of some of the productions documented (p. v-viii). Craig also observes, rather primly, that R. H. Packman's Introduction (p. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] 'concerns itself quite a deal with the "Communistic scheme", and rather too much with Russia and America' (p. viii). In fact, Packman's Introduction details usefully the provenance of many of the design ideas in the book, echoing modernist thought of the period:…”

Section: "The New Movement In the Theatre'mentioning

confidence: 94%

Theatre Workshop, Moussinac, and the European Connection

Paget¹

1995

New Theatre Quarterly

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This article investigates the influence of a French communist writer on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. Joan Littlewood celebrated her eightieth birthday in 1994 – a year which also saw an ‘Arena’ programme about her life and the publication of her memoirJoan's Book. Critics and commentators are agreed that Littlewood was a charismatic director, her Theatre Workshop a ground-breaking company which in the late 1950s and early 1960s acquired an international reputation only matched later by the RSC. However, the company's distinctive style drew as much from a European as from a native English theatre tradition, and in this article Derek Paget examines the contribution to that style of a seminal work on design – Léon Moussinac'sThe New Movement in the Theatreof 1931. Although he was also important as a theorist of the emerging cinema, Moussinac's chief influence was as a transmitter of ideas in the theatre, and in the following article Derek Paget argues that his book offered the Manchester-based group insights into European radical left theatre unavailable to them in any other way. Moussinac thus helped Theatre Workshop to become a ‘Trojan horse’ for radical theatricality in the post-war years, while his design ideas were to sustain the Workshop throughout its period of major creativity and influence. Derek Paget worked in the early 1970s on Joan Littlewood's last productions at Stratford East, and he wrote onOh What a Lovely Warin NTQ 23 (1990). He is now Reader in Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education.

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Section: "The New Movement In the Theatre'mentioning

confidence: 94%

Theatre Workshop, Moussinac, and the European Connection

Paget¹

1995

New Theatre Quarterly

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“…24 The gest imposes a fatal rigor. This is not the rigor to which Jan Kott alludes in his description of the tragic world as one in which crimes are "imposed by heaven."…”

Section: Tv Tonldorfmanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sparagmos as gest in Brecht'sMother Courage

Dorfman

1996

The European Legacy

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“…Founded by Brecht in 1949 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the Ensemble had gradually grown in size and prestige, moving to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1954 to become, in the words of John Willett, a 'full-blown East German State theatre'. 22 The financial support supplied by the recently formed East German Government allowed Brecht the resources to launch an ambitious programme of new dramatic works and classic pieces reworked in an 'epic theatre' mould.…”

Section: Brecht Hanns Eisler and Mi5mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…89 Brecht and the Ensemble were always regarded with a degree of suspicion in official Communist Party cultural circles, with their work often criticized for its 'formalism' and failure to adhere to the orthodox aesthetic of socialist realism. 90 Yet, despiteor even because of -these differences, the Berliner Ensemble became a powerful cultural symbol for the perception of the GDR regime in the West, ensuring that the company became a contested focal point in a wider, at times brutal, Cold War cultural propaganda battle.…”

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confidence: 99%

Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble, and the British Government

Smith¹

2006

New Theatre Quarterly

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barely a month before he was to resign, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, sent a brief, angry memorandum to the Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home. Referring to recent newspaper articles critical of the denial of UK visas to two East Germans, he sarcastically questioned the role of NATO policy in determining the provision of British visas to East German nationals. Macmillan went on to complain that 'I was not consulted about this [refusal], nor was the Cabinet, if I remember right. But it's the kind of thing that interests the public far more than other more important problems.' 1 This was not a case concerning Cold War international espionage or potential national security risks. It concerned, rather, the denial of visas to two members of the world famous Berliner Ensemble, then directed by Bertolt Brecht's widow, Helene Weigel, to enter Britain and attend the 1963 Edinburgh Festival. Indeed, this was not the first time that members of the Berliner Ensemble had been secretly prevented from attending the Edinburgh Festival, but rather marked the peak of a decades-long campaign to disrupt tours of Brecht and the Ensemble to Britain.As a prominent German communist intellectual and, later in his career, a leading cultural icon for East Germany, Brecht was a figure of obvious interest to western governments and their security services, keen as they were to monitor any potential communist subversion at times of heightened political tension. This was most notoriously manifested during Brecht's time in America, between 1941 and 1947, during which the FBI compiled a dossier of almost four hundred pages on Brecht, consisting of reports ranging from routine enquiries into his communist connections and activities to paranoid investigations of supposed secret messages transmitted in films of his work. 2 These investigations culminated in Brecht's remarkable appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in which he fervently denied being a communist, and decreed that any revolutionary agitation found in his work was down purely to anti-Hitler sentiment and poor translation. This resulted in Brecht being thanked by the ntq 22:4 (november 2006) © cambridge university pressIt is well known that Bertolt Brecht, during his time in the United States of America, attracted the surveillance of anti-communist forces, with Brecht's sly testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities becoming one of his most famous public performances. Recently declassified files from Her Majesty's Government reveal that Britain, too, undertook extensive campaigns to monitor and censor Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble. James Smith considers material from British governmental agencies such as MI5, the Foreign Office, and the Cabinet Office, which detail the activities undertaken by the British government concerning Brecht and the Ensemble. Such activities took the form not only of monitoring Brecht and his circle, both in Britain and overseas, but also of active attempts to block the visits of Brecht and the E...

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The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht

Cited by 40 publications

References 0 publications

Theatre Workshop, Moussinac, and the European Connection

Theatre Workshop, Moussinac, and the European Connection

Sparagmos as gest in Brecht'sMother Courage

Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble, and the British Government

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