Brecht on Performance

Messingkauf and Modelbooks

Bertolt Brecht, Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles, Marc Silberman, Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles, Marc Silberman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350077072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Regia e produzione teatrale

Now available in Bloomsbury Revelations series, Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks presents a selection of Brecht's principal writings about the craft of acting and realising texts for the stage. It crystallises and makes concrete many of the more theoretical aspects of his other writing and illuminates the practice of this hugely influential director and dramatist. The volume is in two parts. The first features an entirely new commentated edition of Brecht's dialogues and essays about the practice of theatre, known as the Messingkauf, or Buying Brass, including the 'Practice Pieces' for actors (rehearsal scenes for classics by Shakespeare and Schiller). The second contains rehearsal and production records from Brecht's work on productions of Life of Galileo, Antigone, Mother Courage and others. Edited by an international team of Brecht scholars and including an essay by director and teacher Di Trevis examining the practical application of these texts for theatres and actors today, Brecht on Performance is a wonderfully rich resource. The text is illustrated with over 30 photographs from the Modelbooks.

PART ONE

Messingkauf, or Buying Brass

Introduction

The Messingkauf has long been regarded as Brecht’s single most extensive and – together with the Short Organon for the Theatre (in Brecht on Theatre) – as his most significant exposition of his views on theatre. It was first published in German in 1963, in volume 5 of Brecht’s Schriften zum Theater/Writings on Theatre, edited by Werner Hecht, while John Willett’s English translation The Messingkauf Dialogues appeared in 1965. Willett’s version was based on Hecht’s Dialoge aus dem Messingkauf, a re-edited and reduced version of the ‘full’ text that had been published in 1963. These seemingly minor differences in the work’s title and content are symptomatic of a fundamental problem. During his lifetime, Brecht never completed or published a work called the Messingkauf, and the term Messingkauf – devised by Brecht – actually refers to a diverse and disparate corpus of texts produced by Brecht between 1939 and 1955, the year before he died. There has been much speculation as to why Brecht never finalized the Messingkauf – the disruption and confusion of the exile years, the systematic focus on his own practical theatre work when he returned to East Berlin – but no conclusive explanation has ever been provided.

Most of these texts were contained in four bundles of papers that Brecht had labelled Der Messingkauf, supplemented by various other texts also marked in this way. The contents of the bundles correspond to the three main phases in Brecht’s work on the project: early 1939 to early 1941 in Scandinavia (two bundles), 1942–3 (one bundle) and 1945 (one bundle), both in the USA. The overwhelming majority of the Messingkauf texts are allocated to the Four Nights of discussion and debate that structure the intended work, while the remainder are not allocated to specific Nights. The first phase in the project was the most productive, in terms of the volume of material produced and implementing the Four Night structure. The second phase is notable for the significant amount of additional material produced for the First Night, the third for the high proportion of unallocated miscellaneous material, and the fourth phase (1948–55) for the paucity of new material.

The Messingkauf papers thus present the editor – and translator – with a seemingly intractable problem: how to produce a consistent, reliable and readable version of Brecht’s ‘work’? This problem is exacerbated by the fact that some 50 years after its initial publication, there are still scholarly disputes and disagreements as to which texts actually belong to the Messingkauf corpus. Prior to the publication of the revised German edition of the Messingkauf in the Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (BFA) in 1993 (vol. 22, pp. 695–869), the most comprehensive compilation was contained in volume 5 of Brecht’s Writings on Theatre, whereas Dialoge aus dem Messingkauf excluded the Messingkauf poems and several classic essays – for example ‘The Street Scene’ and ‘Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting’ (both in Brecht on Theatre); and Willett’s Messingkauf Dialogues also omitted the Practice Pieces for Actors. All three volumes were problematic, however, as they shared a contentious editorial approach when constructing their respective versions (the basic principles and rationale informing their approach are outlined in the ‘Notes’ to Willett’s translation, pp. 106–11). Texts are switched between Nights; miscellaneous texts are allocated to specific Nights; separate texts are run together to constitute questionable wholes; in the Hecht and Willett Dialogues volumes, ‘fragments’ are distinguished from ‘dialogues’; and headings are interspersed from Brecht’s various and inconsistent plans for individual Nights. Hecht and Willett are quite open about what they have attempted to do, namely produce a readable version from an extensive and unwieldy corpus of materials, but their respective versions are neither consistent nor reliable.

Nevertheless, Willett’s translation has been the canonical version of the Messingkauf in English for half a century, and Hecht’s editions are still much better known in the German-speaking world than the radical new version published in BFA in 1993. The BFA version of the Messingkauf constitutes a drastic piece of re-editing. Whereas Hecht and Willett had presented the reader with a relatively coherent and eminently readable work, the BFA version does not provide us with a work at all. Instead, it presents some 200 texts in chronological sequence, following the Messingkauf’s key phases of composition: 1939–41, 1942–3, 1945, and 1948–55. Within those phases, the texts are allocated to the Nights Brecht had indicated; unattributed texts follow the four Nights. The BFA version is eminently reliable, in that the texts contained in it correspond sequentially to what Brecht had actually written between 1939 and 1955, and it is also rigorously consistent, by abjuring any attempt to reconstruct a definitive version of the ‘work’. Whereas this may be fascinating for Brecht scholars, it poses considerable difficulties for the general reader, theatre directors or teachers and their students, who need a more user-friendly edition. Just one example suffices: in the BFA version, the famous opening scene does not appear until 78 pages into the text.

The version of the Messingkauf devised for this translation is based on the following principles (see also the table of Contents above): texts are sequenced by individual Night, not in order of composition; within each Night, texts are organized in terms of thematic clusters; miscellaneous texts not allocated to individual Nights are presented in a separate section, but here too organized thematically; the integrity of each separate individual text is retained – separate texts are not ‘run together’; the date of composition of each text is indicated, and each text is identified by using its BFA reference number. In contrast to the Hecht and Willett versions, no distinction is made between ‘dialogues’ and ‘fragments’ – Messingkauf consists almost by definition of fragments – and ‘headings’ drawn from Brecht’s various ‘plans’ are not used: all subheadings are the editor’s, as are the headings Preamble, Miscellaneous Texts, and Plans and Appendices. Although this new edition aims to be significantly more accessible and readable than the BFA version, it also enables the reader to appreciate how Brecht’s Messingkauf project developed over time, especially between 1939 and 1945; to identify and compare shifts of emphasis in Brecht’s conception of individual Nights; and even to speculate as to where the Miscellaneous Texts might be allocated in a real or imaginary performance of this intractable ‘work’.

What emerges is a quite different version of the Messingkauf, entitled Buying Brass, the literal English translation of the German title. But it is also a version that generates fundamental questions regarding how Buying Brass should be read, performed and interpreted. One key question concerns the genre it represents, in view of the variety of text types that it incorporates. There are dialogues varying in length from a few lines to several pages; speeches long and short; essays; poems; texts with and without titles or headings, some of them mere snippets, whose generic status is unclear; and more than twenty meta-texts, such as the various plans and outlines that Brecht produced between 1939 and 1948 or the four Appendices written in August 1940 when less than half of Buying Brass was in place.¹ There are also textual anomalies. In the Second Night, the Actor refers to ‘the fourth wall we were talking about earlier’ (B28, written 1939–41), but the initial reference to the fourth wall occurs at the beginning of the Third Night, when the Dramaturg asks the question ‘What about the fourth wall?’ (B135, written c. 1945). Should both dialogues be included in the same night, even though Brecht allocates them to different nights; be switched between nights; or remain where they are, as a flashback or flash-forward? Similarly, in the ‘Finale’ in the Fourth Night, the Dramaturg refers to the Philosopher’s earlier comment on the notion of ease (B87), but the Philosopher’s only discussion of ease is contained in an unallocated text (B153, Miscellaneous Texts (iii)). Ultimately, we are confronted by the question as to whether Buying Brass can actually be construed as a ‘work’ at all, even in this readable version – or is it rather ‘a loose baggy monster’,² a Brechtian pot-pourri, to be used or appropriated in any way its readers choose?

In a Journal entry dated 19 August 1940, Brecht noted that whenever he opened Buying Brass it was as if a cloud of dust was being blown into his face, and he asked himself ‘How can one imagine something like this ever making sense?’ His initial idea of writing a theoretical work in dialogue form was already being superseded by his own practice, as exemplified in the variety of text types indicated above. By the time the Buying Brass papers were largely in place, the proportion of dialogue to other text types in each Night varied considerably, from 5:1 in the First Night to 1:2 in the Second, and 2:3 in the Miscellaneous Texts. The generic variety of Buying Brass presents the reader who wishes to establish Brecht’s theoretical views as expressed in it with a fundamental problem. Even if we put to one side the interpretative issues raised by presenting theory in dialogue form, in the rest of Buying Brass only the meta-texts can be reliably attributed to ‘Brecht’. Most of the speeches are attributed to specific characters, but some are not and so remain indeterminate; and several texts seem to be short essays, with no clear indication as to who the intended ‘author’ might be. Furthermore, all the Miscellaneous Texts are de-contextualized by virtue of not being allocated to a specific Night, so that we can do no more than speculate as to the interpretative nuances that follow from assigning them to one Night rather than another. If we add to this the fact that there are no clear or reliable indications regarding the linear structure of the individual Nights – the thematic complexes identified by the editor are suggestive, rather than definitive – then Brecht’s question would seem to be unanswerable, and his interpretative dust clouds impossible to dispel.

Brecht himself, however, inadvertently offers two escape routes from this dilemma: by using the terms ‘literarization’ and ‘montage’ in his first plan for Buying Brass (see A2), and via a Journal entry on 18 August 1948 where he describes the Short Organon for the Theatre as a condensed version of Buying Brass – a minor pendant to the magnum opus, as it w...