Brecht Collected Plays: 3: Lindbergh's Flight; The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent; He Said Yes/He Said No; The Decision; The Mother; The Exception & the ... St Joan of the Stockyards (World Classics)
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Even while The Threepenny Opera was still running, its producer E. J. Aufricht had started pressing for another work of the same kind and for the same theatre; so Brecht, Weill and Elisabeth Hauptmann combined to plan a second light satirical entertainment for completion in the summer holidays of 1929. Happy End, with its English title and Runyon-style story, was written by Hauptmann and had memorable songs by Brecht and Weill. But this time Brecht, while providing the plot (which would pit ‘the worst criminal in all Chicago’ against ‘the proverbial Salvation Army lass’), lost interest after the spring and did little or nothing to pull the show together. The result, in the new climate of social and economic crisis, was an almost instant failure: Brecht disowned all responsibility except that for the songs, Hauptmann’s role as author was hidden under a pseudonym, and the wreckage might well have been swept under the mat in favour of the new Lehrstücke with their minimal staging. Nevertheless between them the ‘Brecht collective’ saw enough good material in Happy End, even aside from Weill’s music, to want to rework it as a major play for the orthodox theatre and some of its most admired actors. And so, while Brecht himself became caught up in the new genre, Hauptmann and their amateur boxer friend Emil Hesse-Burri started to make a fresh assault on the scheme for a full-scale epic on the subject of the ‘cold Chicago’ of Frank Norris’s novel The Pit, such as had already underlain Brecht’s Joe P. Fleischhacker from Chicago project announced in Piscator’s book The Political Theatre that same year.
The ambience for this play was again that which had served for In the Jungle (1923) and Brecht’s even earlier ‘Epistle to the Chicagoans’, with its opening lines
The laughter on the slave markets of the continents
Formerly confined to yourselves
Must utterly have shaken you, the cold in the regions of the fourth depth
Will have soaked into your skin . . .
Behind this there was The Jungle itself (1905), with Upton Sinclair’s ‘muck-raking’, blood-smeared images of that city’s meat industry: so much more striking than the wheat market as an object of big business and its manipulations. There were the many biblical allusions. There was the Salvation Army, which had already figured in Georg Kaiser’s expressionist play From Morn to Midnight, and as the background to Brecht’s ‘Exemplary conversion of a grog-seller’ which Weill and he had used in Happy End for the ‘Brandy-peddler’s Song’. Hauptmann herself had written a Salvationist story, called ‘Bessie So-and-so’ and set in San Francisco in 1906; she herself was photographed in that Army’s uniform. Moreover there were the pastiche Army songs too which might be re-used, such as the Salvationists’ opening chorus (into which Weill had woven a snatch of the ‘Internationale’) and the final ‘Hosanna Rockefeller’ (a satire on the great millionaires which would later be omitted from Happy End’s piano score and from its published text).
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The first, largely complete version of Saint Joan of the Stockyards was hammered out in the course of 1930, in between work on the Lehrstücke and the film of The Threepenny Opera; and with this the collective’s long search for the major play at last became focused on one main project. A year later a revised and duplicated script was made available by Bloch-Erben, the agents; then in 1932 it was published with further revisions in Brecht’s series of grey paperbound Versuche. The decisive preliminary step here was the merging of the ‘proverbial Salvation Army lass’ with the classic militant figure of Jeanne d’Arc, canonised by the Vatican in 1920 and now anglo-americised by Brecht as Joan Dark. This idea goes back perhaps to Reinhardt’s production of Shaw’s Saint Joan (at a time when Brecht was a Reinhardt assistant), but also surely to the same author’s Major Barbara, itself written a year after Sinclair’s The Jungle (to which Shaw refers more than once), and incorporating an anticipation of the Joan-Mauler relationship in father-daughter terms. As Hauptmann used to say, Brecht was a ‘name fetishist’, and it may be worth noting that Barbara and Johanna (or Joan) were two of his favourite names.
The radical transformation of this project probably took place in the summer holidays of 1930, which Brecht, Burri and Hauptmann spent in the South of France at Le Lavandou (where much of the work on The Threepenny Opera had been done two years earlier); after which the Berlin magazine Tempo first publicised the new theme and its title, along with the name of Carola Neher who would play the lead. Some of the undated early typescripts had featured another noteworthy character – God, who appears in a number of episodes as a slightly querulous old man puffing his cigar, an embarrassing guest of the Salvation Army, whose shadowy presence in the play has been somewhat ignored (some extracts are given on pp. 420–27, and it is just possible that he survives by an oversight as the Old Man of p. 279). Till then the dialogue had been mainly in prose, but now the new passages of austere rhymeless verse – including some fine long speeches and the sequence of Joan’s ‘Voices’ in scene 11 – seem to accord with those in the Lehrstücke.
Around the same time, too, the collective began to introduce the high-flying literary parodies that characterise the quasi-Elizabethan opening scene and eventually come thick and fast at the end. One cause for this ironic change of tone and rhythm is no doubt the relationship with Schiller’s Shakespearean The Maid of Orleans (of 1801), while another might well be Brecht’s work on a version of Hamlet – for the same radio producer as Saint Joan of the Stockyards – at the end of January 1931. Finally there are Mauler’s Goethe allusions following Joan’s death, which bear out the play’s intention (as a covering note of 1932 has it) to ‘show the present stage of development of Faustian Man’ – that divided character so often found in Brecht’s writings.
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Ever since its release to German theatre managements a mere year and a half before Hitler took power, Brecht’s Joan of Arc play has occupied a special, almost mythical position both in his own oeuvre and in the theatre of his time. Here at last was what he had been aiming for, a big drama for the established professional theatre, whose tragic theme was of instant relevance both in Germany and in the depressed Middle West. Touched early on with Brecht’s new-found Marxism, it had developed politically in step with its author, first so as to express the cyclical pattern of industry as posited in Das Kapital – end of prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation – and then (at a late stage of revision) to refer specifically to the Communists; this too was of interest, at least to the writer’s admirers. And yet the resultant play was, and even today still is, something of a mystery, for its only recorded performance in Brecht’s lifetime was in the much shortened radio version broadcast from Berlin in April 1932. As the radio critic of the (always supportive) Berliner Bórsen-Kurier put it,
One day it will rank among the most memorable, and at the same time disgraceful landmarks of modern cultural history that the theatre had to leave it to radio to communicate one of the greatest and most significant plays of our time.
The recurrent question left behind was twofold: First, how would this play work in performance? And secondly, if it was really such a remarkable work, why were the theatres not falling over one another to put it on?
Some idea of the kind of performance that Brecht had in mind can be got from the unpublished recording of the 1932 broadcast, which featured his two preferred stage protagonists: Carola Neher as Joan and, as Pierpont Mauler the meat king, the powerful Fritz Kortner, who had been the yellow-skinned Shlink of In the Jungle in 1924. Here Kortner speaks conventionally (for that time), but Neher adopts a strange, disjointed way of speaking which sounds like the description of Peter Lorre’s ‘syncopated’ speech in the State Theatre’s famous but short-lived Man equals Man: it must surely have been suggested to her by Brecht. Others in the cast seem likewise to have been his own choice: in fact the list on p. 418 reads like a small roll-call of Brecht actors, including three who would rejoin him after 1948, as well as his wife Helene Weigel. Which composer might have provided the music we do not know, but his designer Caspar Neher (unrelated to Car
ola) sketched a few sets and incidents for the play: notably a kind of three-sided box on a smallish stage, with a free-hanging banner in mid-stage showing images of Joan and other characters.
This certainly suggests a production envisaged for a specific theatre, and some German directors did put in for the rights despite the imminence of Hitler’s Reich. Gustav Gründgens later recalled doing so, though no written record has been found; Heinz Hilpert asked for it for the Berlin People’s Stage; Piscator offered to form a special company, making an agreement in April 1932 to link its performance with that of his own adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Berthold Viertel planned a travelling production based on Vienna; while the Mannheim National Theatre is said also to have applied. At Darmstadt, whose regional (Land) theatre had given the world premieres of Man equals Man and the revised In the Jungle of Cities, Gustav Hartung and Kurt Hirschfeld actually announced a production, only to be overwhelmed by protests both in the press and in the city council; under Hitler they emigrated to Switzerland, where Hirschfeld played an important part in the production of the big exile plays.
In 1934 Sergei Tretiakov in Moscow supervised the publication of three of Brecht’s Epic Dramas in Russian translation: The Mother, The Decision (both with Eisler) and Saint Joan of the Stockyards; Brecht hoped vainly that this would lead to a Soviet production, and had already drawn Tretiakov’s attention to the availability of Carola Neher, who had just emigrated to the USSR. By the end of 1972 the play had still not been produced there. There was some prospect of a production by the Prague Nové Divadlo in the early thirties, but this fell through, as did Thorkild Roose’s proposed production at the Copenhagen Royal Theatre, for which a contract was made in 1935 (though it seems that Ruth Berlau, who was involved in the negotiations, may have performed some scenes with left-wing amateurs). Next a slightly revised text was published by the exiled Malik-Verlag in the year of the Munich Agreement; at one point this was to have been illustrated by George Grosz. From then on the whole project went underground until after the end of the Second World War, when Brecht made his first return to Berlin from emigration. Then, just a week after the triumphant opening of his production of Mother Courage, he wrote to Gustav Gründgens (who had been Goering’s Intendant of the Prussian State Theatre and was now rehabilitating himself under Adenauer as Intendant at Dusseldorf) to say curtly
Berlin NW7, 18.1.49
Dear Mr Gründgens,
You asked in 1932 for permission to perform Saint Joan of the Stockyards. My answer is yes.
Yours
bertolt brecht
– to which Gründgens telegraphed back a fortnight later:
SCARED TO DEATH BY LETTER – BUT DELIGHTED YOU REMEMBER AND GRATEFUL DESPATCH BOOK SOONEST
BEST GREETINGS
GUSTAV GRÜNDGENS
This was a generous if slightly wry gesture by the playwright to the original of Klaus Mann’s (and Istvan Szabo’s) Mephisto, and Gründgens reciprocated by warmly praising the play and saying he was trying to get Kortner for the Mauler part and his own wife Marianne Hoppe for Joan. However, it was another ten years before the production – the play’s world premiere – actually took place in Hamburg, to whose Deutsches Schauspielhaus Gründgens and Hoppe had meanwhile moved. One reason certainly was that Kortner, who was anyway less forgiving than Brecht, felt offended at not having been asked to direct his friend’s play. In the event Brecht’s daughter Hanne Hiob played Joan and got excellent notices. By then Brecht had been dead for nearly three years.
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Given the ‘dark times’ through which he lived, it was not unusual for Brecht’s works to take several years, if not decades, to realise. His poems are perhaps the most striking example; such a high proportion of them remained stashed away among his papers until after his death. But in the case of his plays there is also a clear difference between those which were written quickly, out of a well-formed initial conception, and those which were being continually rewritten, developed, chopped and changed. It is not always easy to guess which of the ensuing works fell into which category, let alone to say that the one is generally ‘better’ or bigger or more successful than the other. Thus both Man equals Man and The Good Person of Szechwan took years to evolve from a quite remote starting point, whereas The Threepenny Opera and Happy End were generated under high pressure, and Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, for all their scale and length, appear to have been written rapidly in a single draft which took relatively little revision. There was an interesting exception to both categories in the shape of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, which was loosely accumulated by stitching together some two dozen separate playlets and sketches.
But Saint Joan of the Stockyards was special, in that the years of work devoted to it spanned not only great changes in Brecht’s writing style and political convictions but also a transformation of the ‘apparatus’ for which it was intended. The new Left apparatus that could embrace music theatre, revue and political sketch was right for the new forms which Brecht was evolving with Weill and Eisler, but the great narrative play for the established theatre turned out to be a vain pursuit for the avant-garde at least so long as the 1930s lasted. Thus the next such work, the adaptation of Measure for Measure that was begun in 1931 and finished up as The Roundheads and the Pointed Heads, could not be performed in Germany, and only briefly elsewhere; Saint Joan of the Stockyards not at all. And when the opportunity returned in Switzerland during the Second World War these two plays were already on Brecht’s back shelf.
The first-named has remained there, with the exception of Eisler’s songs. The second has had a number of productions since Gründgens’s premiere, notably by Benno Besson at different German and Swiss theatres; by the Berliner Ensemble in 1968 (a production that unhappily led to the replacement for a time of Manfred Wekwerth by Ruth Berghaus as artistic director); by Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro in 1970; and by the Haiyuza Theatre in Tokyo in 1965. In North America it has had student productions, while in Dublin and London it was produced, also in the 1960s, with Siobhan McKenna under the direction respectively of Hilton Edwards and Tony Richardson. In the 1970s a production by the Glasgow Citizens with Di Trevis followed. None of them has securely established this work in the world repertoire, and Saint Joan of the Stockyards remains something of an unsolved problem.
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The obvious problems throughout have been the size of the cast and the scale of the setting, which virtually confine it to schools and colleges or to the subsidised theatre. At the same time it has been faulted by critics on both sides of the now crumbled Wall, on two main grounds. On the one hand there is no character to personify ‘the workers’, and Brecht’s attempts to build up the husband-eating Mrs Luckerniddle as such by successive small revisions only made matters worse. ‘But how can this be changed?’ Ernst Schumacher reported the playwright as saying in the last year of his life –
Suppose I turn the leader of the workers into Joe, A Union Official or Bill, A Communist, and give him a clear-cut personality, won’t I be changing my drama about Joan’s petit-bourgeois reformism into an entirely different play? And how can I convey the masses except by a chorus? Of course things can’t stay as they are if we decide to stage it. The workers’ representatives must have a personality, that’s obvious. I’ll have to do some thinking about that.
Secondly, it was felt, especially in the West Germany of the ‘economic miracle’, that the play is in any case no longer very relevant to the modern industrial working class (or ‘workforce’, to use a less question-begging word). And true enough, Chicago around 1900 – the date given on the original stage script and followed by the Berliner Ensemble – or Berlin in 1931, when that script was made, were both of them remote from the relatively well-situated and well-organised, much less class-conscious workers in those cities today, while the great monopolies are becoming more and more international.
Powerful as it is, therefore, did Brecht’s vision become out of date
? Yes, perhaps, if we think only of its conscious preoccupation with the class war. But there is a lot more to this play, and much of it is vividly conveyed. It reminds us that, even after the various economic miracles, we still have depths in modern society, and people who sink to the bottom of them; there are still the poor and disadvantaged who feel the bitter cold, rejects now of what used to be the welfare state who have been thrown back into an unfeeling ‘community’ on the make. Animals are still slaughtered under disgusting circumstances, with more and more of the younger generation drawn to protest, whether by passive vegetarianism or by active concern with animal rights. Factory foodstuffs, battery feeding, artificial additives and adulteration have become topical issues; industrial accidents have changed their nature but are no less dangerous for that; pollution of the environment is a widespread concern that runs across traditional political boundaries. The association of all these things with the profit motive is clear. Meanwhile the ownership of great industries and the continuance or closing down of the companies involved in them is decided by the taking-over and manipulation of shares on the stockmarket.
Religion too has only partly changed its role. If the main branches of organised Christianity are no longer so supportive of the dominant economic order as they once were, there is nevertheless still an active fundamentalist and evangelist fringe that preaches enjoyment of worldly goods in return for social submissiveness. ‘Blessed are the consumers’, it might be said. And all questions concerning God can always be argued. Such are some of the aspects of our nineties that are still latent in Brecht’s Saint Joan story, as well as in the force and irony with which it is narrated. Perhaps they are only waiting to be brought out. True enough, the ‘battle between good and evil’ is not so simple as its author at first suggested – but was it ever? The divided self of Faustian Man proves to be more confusingly subdivided than most Marxists thought – but isn’t it all the more fascinating for that? One way and another the challenge to actors and directors remains, and with it the future of Brecht’s most perplexing play.