'Brechtian' ... a dirty word?

An article which came to me from Richard Byrne, friend of d&pdc & Courage:

When did 'Brechtian' become such a dirty word? The old Marxist ironist is due for re-appraisal

Michael Billington, The Guardian, 10-20-09

When I applied the word "Brechtian" to Annie Get Your Gun at the Young Vic yesterday, I knew I was running a calculated risk. You don't expect a popular musical to be given such a non-selling label. What I meant to imply was that Richard Jones's superb production invited us to see the show, critically, as a piece of 1940s romantic myth-making about the American West. Unfortunately, however, "Brechtian" these days has come to mean "slow, ponderous, didactic."

Intriguingly, Deborah Warner's current Mother Courage at the National is the very opposite of what we normally mean by "Brechtian": it's light, nimble-footed with a piratical performance from Fiona Shaw and a Duke Special score in which Weimar meets soft rock. But Brecht himself is partly to blame for the way he is often done: he left behind a mountain of "model-books" about his productions which, slavishly followed, lead to leaden revivals. Throw away the rule-books and the plays live again.

And, although Brecht himself once said his work's future depended on communism's survival, I suspect he's due for re-appraisal. With capitalism going through one of its cyclical crises, his plays have acquired renewed topicality.

"What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?" asks Macheath in The Threepenny Opera. It's questions like that which give the old Marxist ironist his vigour and productions such as those by Jones and Warner which take the curse off the word "Brechtian". 

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/oct/20/pass-notes-bertolt-brecht