Bertolt Brecht (review)

Reviewed by: Bertolt Brecht W. Stuart McDowell Meg Mumford . Bertolt Brecht. Routledge Performance Practitioners and Modern and Contemporary Dramatists. New York: Routledge, 2009. Pp, xiv + 188, illustrated. $110.00 (Hb); $28.95 (Pb). There is clearly a need for a fresh introductory book about the lifework of Bertolt Brecht, widely considered to be one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century theatre. One of the first and best of these was Martin Esslin's Brecht: The Man and his Work, reissued numerous times with the title Brecht: A Choice of Evils but, since 1985, out of print. One would hope, therefore, that Routledge – the printing house that provided us with excellent introductions to the work of Mary Wigman by Mary Ann Santos Newhall and to the work of Ariane Mnouchkine by Judith G. Miller – would have filled this need with the latest addition to their series entitled Performance Practitioners. I am sad to report, however, that from the first page, one questions the scholarship of the author and the seeming haste with which the editors at Routledge brought to press Meg Mumford's Bertolt Brecht. There, in the first sentence of the introductory section entitled "Which Brecht?", the years of Brecht's life are listed as "1989–1956." This error is prelude to many others, and to awkward phrases such as a heading that reads "Piscator and other revolutionary experiments" (Mumford 22). Was Erwin Piscator an experiment? Mumford has undertaken a considerable amount of homework in assembling this book, but her arguments are weakened by repeated authorial interjections, such as "it is this writer's position that Brecht had little time for the idea of eternal suffering," and "I prefer to use 'defamiliarization' because I think it more clearly conveys the fact that Brecht regarded Verfremdung as political intervention into the (blindingly) familiar" (Mumford 60–61). The structure of the book is distorted by the author's preoccupation with Brecht's theoretical writings, and the majority of Brecht's dramas are given short shrift. Key pre-Marxist works Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, and Edward II get, at most, a paragraph each; the author skims over the epic opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and many other later plays in a few sentences. Thus, in the brief discussion of Brecht's enormously successful and influential The Threepenny Opera, [End Page 504] Mumford writes, "The box-office hit The Threepenny Opera (1928), a collaboration of Hauptmann and the composer Kurt Weill supported by private funding, is an example of a Schaustück that has some of the defining features of Minor Pedagogy" (Mumford 23–24). Is such an awkward sentence intended for students of German, of theatre, or of Marxism? Roughly two thirds of Mumford's Bertolt Brecht focuses on "Brecht's Key Theories" and the "Practical Exercises and Workshop" that derive from those theories. Mumford evidently intends this last section for students and teachers in the classroom and/or for actors and directors rehearsing a play by Brecht for performance. Yet she never mentions the fact that, time and again, actors who worked with Brecht insisted that he never discussed his controversial theories of Verfremdung or Gestus in rehearsal. Why then, should there be such emphasis given to the theoretical in his work, when Brecht was not in the least bit theoretical when he rehearsed his own plays? Indeed, one could argue that, when Brecht was triumphant as a director (for example, with his productions of Mother Courage and her Children with Therese Giehse in Munich in 1950 and of The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Berlin four years later), it was despite his theoretical writings about acting, not because of them. Mumford is not the first writer to dwell on Brecht's theoretical writings about acting, but they are, in reality, nothing more than conjectures and after-the-fact assessments of what Brecht thought was taking place when a performer was successful – in Brecht's opinion – on the stage. Included in the book is a refreshing, in-depth examination of "A Model Production" of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Brecht's 1954 production at the Berliner Ensemble that toured to Paris and...

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