Berliner Ensemble Adaptations

by Bertolt Brecht

  The Trial of Joan of Arc and Don Juan did not attract any adverse criticism. One can only speculate about why this was the case, but The Trial was, like The Tutor, a little-known work, and it was written by Anna Seghers, a socialist writer of impeccable credentials. Brecht’s additions were not controversial – they mostly expanded the crowd scenes to involve the Party’s hero of choice, the common people. Don Juan was being rehearsed on one of the most traumatic days in the GDR’s history: 17 June 1953. This was the day when workers went on strike and protested against the SED’s economic policies. With support from the West, the protests became an uprising in which the masses on the streets called for the removal of the SED from power. Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin and order was restored, yet the SED was given the bloodiest of noses and was forced to dilute its hard-line position on a variety of fronts. What followed for the cultural sector was something of a thaw. It is difficult to know whether Don Juan would have attracted censure in the first place – Molière was not as problematic as Goethe or Shakespeare, and to call a possibly progressive aristocrat decadent was hardly incendiary. It is more likely that the authorities felt severely restricted in their ability to intervene and this particular play offered so little offence that it would not have been worth criticizing the work.

  * * * * *

  Adaptations, it would seem, were an important part of the BE’s repertoire, yet the BE’s two attempts at Urfaust raise an important question regarding the necessity of adaptations at Brecht’s theatre at all. With the SED firmly applying pressure to Coriolanus, Brecht decided to trust his own approaches to making theatre rather than risk a ban on a play he considered important. Brecht’s stagecraft was concerned with activating the audience and he developed a range of ideas and practices to achieve this. At their base was the desire to do away with a harmonic union of signs transmitted from the stage to the auditorium. For example, Brecht did not necessarily want lines about, say, happiness to be delivered in a happy voice, or for music to tell the same story as a song’s lyrics. Similarly, an actor’s body could articulate something different from what he or she was saying. Such moves were designed productively to unsettle the spectators and ask them why the theatre was saying two different things at once. In short, Brecht was keen for his audience to question what it saw and heard, and to ask what might be motivating it. And with his customary emphasis on the social, contributory factors tended to emanate from society rather than the characters.

  So Brecht had envisaged modes of performing which criticized or at least modified the material being performed. His theatre of juxtaposed signs deferred ultimate interpretation to the audience. Performance was thus taking on some of the qualities identified in the adaptation discussed above: it pointed to areas one might consider questionable and invited constructive responses. Brecht said as much shortly before his death in 1956: ‘if I were putting him [Shakespeare] on today, it is only small changes I would have to make in the production, changes of emphasis’. Sadly, we do not know how Brecht would have directed Coriolanus or any other classic play after this pronouncement, but perhaps he had realized by then that the stage could offer a forum for creative challenges to dramatic works to dislodge the centrality of the written adaptation. Regardless of this late position, the BE continued to adapt plays, including those by Brecht that were as yet unperformed, such as Arturo Ui and The Days of the Commune.

  Whether Brecht planned to shift from adapting texts to staging them more radically will never be known. The adaptations in this volume, however, give a clear sense of Brecht’s theatrical interests and the directions he sought to pursue upon arriving back in Germany and taking control of an ensemble of his own. The need to make socially useful theatre runs through the adaptations, and the dramaturgical ‘corrections’ he introduced point to a need to readjust older plays for a more complete picture of society represented on stage. From a new role for the common people to the relativisation of seemingly autonomous central characters, the plays give the audience more to consider in terms of the interaction between the individual and society. This expansion of the social palette was matched by an almost iron resolve to achieve clarity on stage. The social contradictions could not be blurred or mistaken for something else, otherwise the audience would not be able to make informed decisions. The adaptations strove to include only salient material. This did not mean that society was in some way reduced to simple tensions; rather the adaptation process was concerned with bringing out the complexities of society in a clear fashion. Merely observe the dynamic modulations that run through the crowd scenes in The Trial of Joan of Arc, for example, to understand how changes in situation affect different social strata in different ways.

  The adaptations draft a vision of socially committed drama to act as a corrective to plays that suggest we are prisoners of our psychology and unable to influence our environment. Brecht and his collaborators set about probing the texts in question to expose how people got trapped in the seemingly unchangeable structures of society and to ask in whose interests such structures functioned. Hasty, the eponymous tutor, is no fool but finds himself suffering at the hands of a system loaded against him. While he can hardly be said to triumph at the play’s conclusion, the audience, armed with more knowledge about the social set-up, can speculate about how Hasty and others like him might seek to escape their fate.

  The BE was a hothouse that produced innovative ways of conceptualizing and realizing theatre. The adaptations in this volume represent one of the strands Brecht developed to change the theatrical landscape of Germany. While they are one of many, they endure today as documents that reflect important directions for a new kind of theatre. And while reading them is one thing, they also invite theatre-makers to take up their challenge and realize productions that present a world which may not be easy to change, but is changeable all the same.

  The Tutor

  Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz

  Adaptation

  Collaborators: R. Berlau, B. Nesson, E. Monk, C. Neher

  Translators: Ralph Manheim and Wolfgang Sauerlander

  Characters*

  Hasty, a tutor Lisa, his ward

  Pastor Hasty, his father Count Vermouth

  Privy Councillor von Berg Squint and Buttress, students

  Fritz, his son Mrs. Blitz, a landlady

  Major von Berg Miss Swandown

  Mrs. von Berg, his wife Caroline Squint

  Gussie, their daughter Miss Cotton

  Leopold, their son Miss Miller

  The von Bergs’ Maid Miss Gosling

  Wenceslas, a village schoolmaster

  * See note, p. 410.

  Prologue

  In which the tutor introduces himself to the audience.

  Ladies and gentlemen, the play you’re about to see

  Was written in the eighteenth century.

  A household tutor is the part I play

  Ancestor of our teachers of today.

  I’m still a servant of the nobility

  Teaching their offspring for a meager fee

  A little manners, the Bible more fully

  And how to sneer and sham and bully.

  I myself, though I’ve had a higher education

  Am and remain of humble station.

  Of course the times have been changing of late

  The middle class is rising in the state.

  Unless I read the portents wrong

  I’ll be serving it before too long.

  Adept at toeing any line

  I’m sure that I will suit it fine.

  With all their trimming, clipping, drilling

  Those nobles made me only too willing

  To teach what suits the ruling class—

  A habit that will never pass.

  But what I really do, you’ll see

  Is spell out the sorry state of Germany.

  Act One

  1

  Insterburg in Prussia. Outside Privy Councillor von Berg’s ornamental garden.

  Privy Co
uncillor. Major.

  Major Things aren’t doing too well at the farm, William. No horses to be had, not for love nor money. Zounds! The country still hasn’t recovered from the war—seven years of it.—There comes that starveling again, I can’t take a step without running into him.

  (Hasty passes, bowing and scraping four times. His greetings are not acknowledged)

  Hasty Oafs! The devil take you!

  Privy Councillor Who’s that lickspittle?

  Major They tell me his name is Hasty, a pastor’s son. My wife asked him to call, she needs a tutor for Leopold; I suppose he’ll do as well as anyone.

  Privy Councillor I remember that name. His father’s been pestering me to do something for him. He wanted a position at the town school. But he’s not trained for it. His father’s purse gave out before his finals. What is he to teach your son?

  Major Drum a little knowledge and good manners into him, so he can grow up to be a soldier like me.

  Privy Councillor He may be good enough for that, Frederick. (He enters the garden, preceding the major, and stops in front of a plant) Farra communis, the common fern, oldest plant on earth.—But tell me, brother, about this Hasty, do you know what sort of man you’ll be taking into your house? What about his ethical maturity? My own inquiries have not been too thorough. I haven’t looked into his past.

  Major All I know is that he’s not overcharging. And what with the war and the high cost of living …

  Privy Councillor I wouldn’t want anything cheap. That’s why I’m sending my boy Fritz to the university in Halle.

  Major ’Sblood! Enough about that lout. We were talking about your fern here.

  Privy Councillor The fern whose remote ancestor, the horsetail, can be traced back to the ice age …

  2

  Gussie’s room.

  Gussie. Fritz von Berg.

  Gussie Fritz! How far is Halle?

  Fritz Three hundred miles or three miles—as you like. If I can’t stay here, Gussie, and you’re unattainable in any case, what difference is there between three miles and three hundred?

  Gussie And you’ll be in Halle and …

  Fritz With you heart and soul! But you won’t write to me and I shall cease to exist.

  Gussie Then you think it won’t be a separation when you get into the coach, not a real separation?

  Fritz We’ll always be together in spirit. Take this, Gussie! (He gives her Klopstock’s Odes)

  Gussie Klopstock! (Reads)

  “The drunken joy of the long wept-for,

  Almost too blissful hour

  Which tells the lover that he is loved!”

  “And now two beauteous souls, ennobled, feel

  Wholly, for the first time wholly, the fullness of their being!”

  Oh!—But Uncle will marry you off to that ungodly Count Vermouth long before I take my degree. My three years at the university will be a long time in your life!

  Gussie Three years or thirty, as you like.—I hear my father and my uncle in the hall. Let’s go out into the garden.

  Fritz No, they’re gone. But I’ll come back. Wait, Gussie, read just this: “Hermann and Thusnelda.” The return of the Cheruscan.

  Gussie (reads)

  “Ah, there he comes, covered with sweat, with

  Roman blood and the dust of battles. Never was

  Hermann so beautiful! Never did such flames

  Flash from his eyes.

  Come, I tremble with desire, hand me the eagle

  And thy blood-drenched sword! Come, breathe here and rest

  In my embrace

  From the too terrible battle.”

  Wait, let’s go out to the summer-house.

  Fritz No, no, Papa’s outside. Go on reading.

  Gussie (reads)

  “Rest here that I may wipe the sweat from thy brow

  And from thy cheek the blood. Thy cheek’s on fire!

  Hermann, Hermann, never before

  Has Thusnelda loved thee so!”

  Oh, Fritz!

  “Not even when first in the shade of the oak thou

  Seizedst me impetuously in thy tawny arms!

  Fleeing I stayed and saw upon thee

  The mark of immortality.”

  Fritz Gussie …

  Gussie Would you—no, I mustn’t ask you.

  Fritz Ask for my life, for my last drop of blood.

  Gussie We were going to swear an oath together.

  Fritz Yes, let us. Magnificent. Let us kneel down here beside the bed. You raise your finger like this and I raise mine.—Tell me now, what shall I swear to you?

  Gussie That you’ll always fly to the arms of your Gussie at holiday time and come back from the university in three years and make Gussie your wife, no matter what your father says.

  Fritz And what will you promise in return, my angelic …

  (Kisses her)

  Gussie I swear that I will never, never marry anyone but you, not even if the Tsar of Russia himself should come and ask me.

  Fritz I swear a thousand oaths—

  (The Privy Councillor comes in: both jump up with loud screams)

  Privy Councillor Make a clean breast of it. What have you two been up to? For shame, I thought I had a sensible son. You want to study law, and you can’t even teach yourself how to behave? Come here, both of you. I choose to see no wrong. If you like to be with your cousin, Fritz, I have no objection, but now it’s off to Halle with you to become a beacon to humanity. To make yourself worthy of her. And to learn the meaning of true freedom. Which distinguishes man from the animals. Stallions and mares have to do it, but human beings are free not to. Understand, son? (Fritz nods shamefacedly) Consequently I want you to take leave of each other at once, without constraint, pursuant to your better judgment, voluntarily. No letters to be exchanged, except unsealed. Promise? (Fritz and Gussie nod) Thoughts are free, but writing will be censored. Now, say good-bye in my presence—and refrain of your own free will from doing anything that cannot be done in the presence of witnesses. (Fritz makes a bow to Gussie, she curtsies to Fritz) Yes, children, reason is a hard taskmaster.

  3

  Mrs. von Berg’s parlor.

  Mrs. von Berg at the spinet, Hasty stands beside her in a deferential attitude, Leopold stands catching flies.

  Mrs. von Berg I’ve spoken to your father; he suggested a salary of three hundred ducats and we’ve settled on a hundred and fifty. In return I must ask you, Mr.—what was the name?—Mr. Hasty, to keep yourself in clean clothes and not to disgrace our house. As to your daily schedule, you will take your chocolate at seven with the young master and see to it that he eats properly; his health is delicate. School from eight to twelve. Afternoon: a walk in the public park and be sure never to let go of his hand, he’s a very spirited boy. From six until dinner time you may sit by the bay window and pursue your own studies. In the evenings I shall expect you to entertain our guests. I trust you’ve got a tongue in your head. I expect you to show good taste and to be honorable as well. The last tutor had to be dismissed for stuffing his pockets with pears.—Do you skate? Could you teach Leopold?—And are you proficient in dancing?

  Hasty I hope your ladyship will be pleased with me. In Leipzig I never missed a ball, I must have had at least five dancing masters.

  Mrs. von Berg Indeed? Won’t you show me? A figure from the minuet. Make me a compliment. Don’t be nervous, Mr. … Hasty. Don’t be nervous! My son hates books as it is; if his tutor turns out to be a simpleton, that will be the end of him. Just to give me an idea.—Well, well, not bad. Now, if you please, a pas.—You’ll do. You’ll get into the spirit once you’ve attended one of our soirées … Are you a musician?

  Hasty I play the violin and I can get by on the spinet.

  Mrs. von Berg Splendid! I’ve always had to sing for the dear children when they wanted to dance. That will be a great improvement.

  Hasty Your ladyship, you overwhelm me. Is there any virtuoso in the whole world who would dare match his instrume
nt against your ladyship’s voice?

  Mrs. von Berg Ha, ha, ha, you haven’t even heard me yet.… Wait, do you know this minuet? (She sings)

  Hasty Ah … Ah … You must forgive my enthusiasm. (Kisses her hand)

  Mrs. von Berg I happen to be enrhumée, I’m sure I sound like a crow. Vous parlez français, sans doute?

  Hasty Un peu, madame.