Bertolt Brecht

The Threepenny Opera

Berliner Ensemble/ Adelaide Festival

08 March 2024

The Threepenny Opera (courtesy of Adelaide Festival/Berliner Ensemble)

The enduring popularity of The Threepenny Opera is often attributed to Kurt Weil’s music rather than Bertolt Brecht’s text. As director Barrie Kosky notes with characteristic hyperbole in the Adelaide Festival program for his new production with the Berliner Ensemble: ‘Weil … is as important for the history of music theatre as Wagner.’ ... (read more)

The Tragedy of Macbeth

by Jordan Prosser •

20 December 2021

'The Tragedy of Macbeth': Shakespeare by way of Brecht in Joel Coen’s new film

Could Macbeth be Shakespeare’s most innately cinematic play? Even in its brief stage directions and off-stage action, it conjures up daring battlefields, horrible massacres, spine-tingling witchcraft, wandering spirits, duels on castle ramparts, and a moveable forest. Every few years another filmmaker tries their hand at it, Orson Welles (Macbeth, 1948), Akira Kurosawa (Throne of Blood, 1957), and Roman Polanski (Macbeth, 1971) notable among them. 2006 gave us Geoffrey Wright’s best-forgotten Dunsinane-does-Underbelly version, while Justin Kurzel (director of Snowtown and the recent Nitram) injected his terrific 2015 version with rousing battle sequences and a blockbuster-ready, musclebound Thane of Glamis. Now, not long after Kurzel’s film, comes The Tragedy of Macbeth from Joel Coen, working without his brother Ethan for the first time in decades. Where Kurzel’s version aimed for historical realism and cinematic virtuosity, Coen’s adaptation is faithful above all else to Macbeth’s original medium: the theatre.

... (read more)

Chinese Brecht

by Fiona Gruber •

Roving Blog

I was asked to interview the Chinese theatre director Meng Jinghui recently. He’s a cult figure in China, an associate director of the Beijing-based National Theatre and has over two million followers on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

Meng Jingui holding a ... </div>

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Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship by Erdmut Wizisla, translated by Christine Shuttleworth

by Michael Morley •

March 2010, no. 319

Michael Morley reviews 'Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship' by Erdmut Wizisla, translated by Christine Shuttleworth

German commentators have often asserted – not without some justification – that passages of the established Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare are superior to the original. A contentious proposition, perhaps. But in the case of the volume under review, which first appeared in German in 2004, there is no doubt that although, as the publisher’s note points out, ‘a section devoted to a discussion on the debate … about the initial republication and publication of Walter Benjamin’s work in Germany from the mid fifties’ has been omitted, the resulting book is clearer and more user-friendly than the original, with its arguments shown to better advantage. A chronology of the Benjamin-Brecht relationship (relocated more sensibly at the front of the book), plus a map and time chart of the two writers, make it easier to refer back to the stages and dates of the relationship, along with – so crucial to an understanding of the course of the friendship and temper of the debates between the two principal participants, as well other involved contemporaries – the stations of the exile years between 1933, 1941 (Benjamin’s death), and 1947 (Brecht’s return to Europe).

... (read more)

Bertolt Brecht: Journals 1934–1955 edited by John Willett, translated by Hugh Rorrison

by Noel King •

July 1994, no. 162

Noel King reviews 'Bertolt Brecht: Journals 1934–1955', edited by John Willett, translated by Hugh Rorrison

Bertolt Brecht’s poem, ‘To those born later’, contains the following line: ‘For we went, changing countries oftener than our shoes.’ The publication of this translation of Brecht’s Journals 1934-1955 (written in an e.e. cummings-style lower case throughout) provides an abundant fleshing out of that line, giving a detailed sense of what it meant to Brecht to be an artist in exile, denied the comforts of his culture and language, denied the possibility of seeing the plays he was writing rehearsed or run-through, a process he always regarded as the final stage of writing: ‘all the plays that have not been produced have something or other missing. no play can have the finishing touches put to it without being tried out in production.’

... (read more)