This may not be for everybody, two solid hours without interval of Brecht’s writings delivered in German with English surtitles, but it is for me. Some extracts are in English; I prefer the original. I’m moved almost to tears, which takes me by surprise. Maybe it is its relevance to today’s global events that jolt the spirit, dictators on the march again. Or maybe it is muscle memory.
A vital collage of his poems, songs, musings political and personal, delivered by Berliner Ensemble’s Katharine Mehrling and Paul Herwig with musical director Adam Benzwi pounding on an upright piano. Ballads popular in dissident literature, music highlighting words, making them easier to remember.
Homage or a timely recap of a destructive historical period that killed and displaced so many. It’s about paying attention to time, memory (has our collective memory been erased?) and the power of words. If only I could get them all down.
Whatever your views are of Brecht, there is much to gain from some very wise words: our collective humanity and his personal journey in understanding it. The pleasures and paradoxes of life: to each other we are stranger than the moon (in our digital age, this sounds almost prophetic). Herwig is Brecht as he ages.
Mehrling takes many roles: Weimar cabaret singer draped over the piano, in Hitler (though his name is never mentioned, we know full well who the “house painter” is) moustache she channels him and Chaplin, soldier’s widow in ballgown singing of what goodies he brought from all the cities Hitler’s army conquered, a sad clown and more. She has a terrific voice.
All the while, Brecht is typing and revealing himself in his diaries, poems (poetry is “a message in a bottle”) and parables (the vixen and the rooster). And photos, some shown to the front row… I, Bertolt could / should be the title of this biographical romp. I wonder what would be his moral dilemmas now, his political allegiances?
His bourgeois upbringing in Augsburg, his class consciousness, his solidarity with the workers, his sojourn in airless America, in several European cities, then his return to Berlin after the war and the founding of the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin.
A large screen behind the pair illustrates his mental and physical journey: American skyscrapers, his home and the butchery of the Nazi regime, abattoir and coalmine workers, skeletal corpses, snow over pine trees, rain on a pane of glass. It is very moving. He talks of escaped starving children desperate to find a way out of a pine forest in 1939, and their dog.
Thoughtfully structured, direction and pace by Oliver Reese is unhurried and in effect there are three acts. One in the days of the Weimar Republic, collaborations with Elisabeth Hauptmann, Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler and his success with The Threepenny Opera.
Two follows exile, his writing about politics and war, which included Mother Courage and Her Children, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
Three is his return home with his wife, actress Helene Weigel, the rest we know, and his death in 1956. But they all meld into one continuous whole, with shifts of tempo and a variety of numbers to jolt our attention. A wordy concert one could say.
Here is his legacy, the Berliner Ensemble. Stage adaptation is by Adam Benzwi, Oliver Reese and Lucien Strauch. It is revelatory. And a cliché (aren’t we all walking clichés?): everything passes, life’s a journey. The moon rises, or is it the earth? It is cyclical. The company is here for only three days; it is standing room only. It is an event.
Reviewer: Vera Liber