Berliner Ensemble Adaptations

by Bertolt Brecht

  A good gesture by Fritz: at “Your duty is my duty,” his hand is on his heart in true romantic style. A little hesitantly, it creeps down to his waistcoat pocket: “Command my purse.”

  Pätus counts the twenty thalers out on the table, coin by coin, lending the operation a symbolic significance.

  10. Sooner or later it had to happen

  Lenz had Läuffer sitting by the bed. We thought it would help the development of the story if we showed him and Gustchen in bed together. This needs to be the next thing one sees after seeing how he was denied a horse for his excursions to Königsberg. First and foremost it is the solution to a problem; only then do scruples begin to appear, together with the shadows of difficulties to come. The scene is a difficult one for the actor playing Läuffer. He must never let himself be harsh, merely lost in other thoughts. On top of that he is physically relaxed, sated, even though he finds, poor devil, that reflecting on the possibility of unpleasant consequences sours the long-awaited sensual pleasure. His occasional cynicism (as in the sentence about his over-nourishment, with which he bears out the privy councillor’s “Been feeling your oats?”) has something helpless about it. He has got up to help himself to Gustchen’s morning chocolate on the table. On his return to the bedside his broody mood deepens. Every minute the chasm between the two of them grows wider. Quickly it becomes evident that they have simply been using one another.

  So far as Gustchen is concerned the subject of “love by proxy” has already been introduced in the previous scene. At first she is relaxed, stretches out comfortably and speaks with a lazy frivolousness, as if from another planet. She takes his hand briskly as if picking up a prop, puts it on the edge of the bed before her and ponders over it, stroking the air above it as if contact might destroy the illusion that it is Fritz’s. Nonetheless there is an underlying sexual satisfaction to the frivolous tone of the first sentences, and when she makes up to Läuffer using the Romeo and Juliet monologue she had been saving for Fritz, it is because she is at the same time nervous that he may draw away as soon as he begins thinking. Läuffer’s departure is hurried and undignified, and not on his part alone. Reproaching him for having stayed too long, she hands him his vest, which has been lying on the bed, a witness of their union. There is one touching moment for Gustchen in this scene, where she reacts to his “I’m not Romeo, I’m Läuffer” by sitting up, staring at him as if she were seeing an unknown man in her bed, then falling back and weeping. But whatever element of tragedy enters into this must be on Läuffer’s side. Where she for him still stands proxy for an anonymous Nature, he for her has to stand proxy for a quite specific man: Fritz.

  11. The discovery

  Frau von Berg’s passion for singing is evidence that ugly and beautiful sentiments are entirely compatible; after all, didn’t that Gestapo butcher Heydrich adore his Bach? What makes her performance ugly is not so much her voice as her unbridled energy. When she upbraids her husband the major, meanwhile playing the “Largo,” she does so because he is coming from work; he for his part sees music as a source of slovenly conduct, and sweeps the music off the spinet with his hoe. The major’s wife’s angry lamentations over the family disgrace are made all the more piquant by the audience’s knowledge that this is a family where the mother is trying to steal her daughter’s suitor (though that is as far as the comic aspect must go). The parts of the major and his wife should be given to actors with vitality; Europe has had two hundred years in which to learn how horribly vital their class is.

  12. Läuffer finds a refuge

  Läuffer’s dark premonitions have been fulfilled. We see him seeking refuge in a village school, hunted like a criminal. Here, in the gutter, everything will be repeated—his aggression, his reduction to impotence, his persecution—except that this time the persecutor is himself. The refuge turns into a rat-trap. The schoolmaster Wenzeslaus’ mistrust yields to a recognition that he has found a cheap slave in this victim of persecution who is ready to do anything in exchange for shelter. Soon he has him sitting down at the table correcting exercise books, and is able himself to lean back in his chair and take things easy. The victim has to eat, work, smoke, and listen to self-satisfied homilies all at the same time, and he does all this with crawling humility. The element of exploitation here is so naive and so coated with morality that Läuffer still calls the schoolmaster his benefactor a year later—something that needs to be brought out by the actor. We must combine Wenzelaus’ worst features—his appalling sense of humour, his thirst for freedom that can be slaked by beer and cheap gin, his combination of pedantry and high-flying base thoughts, etc.—with as much approach at humanity as can be managed. At the same time the model in whose image he brings up children must be such as to inspire terror.

  When the feudal mob bursts in it is a good idea to have the wounded Läuffer lying as long as possible uncared-for: the injustices inflicted on and by him get debated across his bleeding body. The major charges into the room in search of his daughter, then goes on marching to and fro, so as to carry on the search for her by this movement. The privy councillor merely demonstrates fear of scandal. Dramaturgically speaking, the twelfth scene is a seesaw, a plank laid across a beam. The tutor steps on to the plank in the most profound distress, prior to walking further and further up it until his weight makes it tip over and drop him into the bottommost depths.

  13. Gustchen at the lake

  Leaving Läuffer to a confused fate (which still has one or two things up its sleeve for him) we observe his employers setting their affairs in order. The life-saving scene by the lake will bear a certain amount of comedy; it may be a disaster, but there are servants at one’s call. However, true though it may be that tragedy leads a precarious existence wherever the standard of living is high, it would be wrong to strip Gustchen and the major of any kind of seriousness. It should of course be shown how Gustchen waits for her rescuers before wading into the lake, how she takes off her shoes in order to leave them a clue, how she turns round once more in order to add her carefully folded shawl, then steps into the water with her face averted; all this, however, is really because she knows that in their circles anything can be arranged and straightened out, given a little good will. There is more comedy in the count, who has forgotten his status as a suitor and has simply come along to glean impressions for his chronique scandaleuse, likewise in the privy councillor who, being in no position to lift a finger himself, makes do with “organizing” the rescue operation and putting forward observations of an appropriately general kind. The major’s accents are entirely serious, as are his wild cursing of the domestics who fail to hand him the pole quickly enough, and the sermon which he reads his daughter. At the end of the scene, when she is in her father’s arms, we allowed her to give a contented little waggle of the feet.

  14. The self-castration

  The fourth act is one of the most subtle ever written, and the whole of it needs to be clearly lifted out of the rest of the play and to have its poetry underlined in such a way that the audience can transfer the self-mutilation from the sexual to the wider intellectual sphere. For it we changed the lighting; by omitting the projections normally used to indicate locality we made a very dark and unfamiliar background without otherwise altering the harsh lighting of the set. In addition we enclosed the three scenes in a musical framework, using Mozart’s “Turkish March” scored for harpsichord, cymbals, and piccolos. For the rest we took particular pains to bring out the realistic element in the acting. After all, if this episode is left uninterpreted, presented in its own terms, i.e., signifying nothing more than the dilemma of a poor devil forced to opt for a sexual life or a professional one, it will still be typical enough of the social order in question.

  14 a.

  This scene shows Läuffer undergoing a nightmare. Once more his sex rises up against him. The arrangement accordingly needs to hark back to scene 7, the catechism lesson. The same way of stalking the victim, of trying to get behind it. The escape to the window. The unsteady wa
lk thence to the wall, as if an invisible storm were blowing a leaf to perdition. The slaps he gives himself with a ruler.

  One or two further details: when Lise comes back with the coffee pot and knocks, Läuffer has his pen poised to make a correction. Still holding it thus poised he walks over to the door as in a dream, opens it, takes the pot from Lise, pushes her away, closes the door, comes back to the table, puts the pot down, then finally makes the correction. Lise, as her guardian is dragging her off at the end of the scene, breaks away from him, goes back to the table with averted face and fetches her lamp.

  14 b.

  Läuffer delivered his soliloquy standing in front of the blackness of the open window. In it the element of speculation predominated, but there was something like an explosion with the phrase “in the presence of her creation,” while the decision seemed to be reached with “Shall I pluck out the eye that offends me?” When he ripped off his coat at the end one saw the wildness that marks counter-revolution.

  14 c.

  For this scene we created total silence; the stormy night of its predecessors was intended purely to let us achieve a silence that should be almost audible. Overturned furniture, scattered clothing provided evidence of the wildness that had gone before. At the end of the scene the snow which was to fall throughout the fifth act became visible for the first time on the cyclorama. Some such mixture of realistic and poetic elements seemed to us absolutely necessary at this point. The big problem for the actors is the breathtakingly swift transition from Läuffer’s tragic admission that he has castrated himself to the schoolmaster’s hymn of praise. The audience hardly has time to feel sorry for the wretched man before it is once again being asked to feel contempt for him. No sooner has the poor tutor’s persecution achieved its goal than the playwright attacks him too. This rapid transition, which is necessary for the development of the comedy since it is only in this way that we can erase the individual, surgical element, works if the actor playing the schoolmaster gives full effect to his emotional shock and likewise to his natural fright, then allows this fright to tinge his “Say no more. You shouldn’t have done it!” and calls him a “second Origen” as if he were announcing a discovery.

  An alternative solution was suggested by the Swiss playwright Frisch: to start with “You shouldn’t have done it!” leaving the audience to wonder nervously what had happened, and in the reading of the letter insert after “by my own decision—a cruel one, I can assure you—” the words “to castrate myself.”

  In any case it is essential for the actor playing the schoolmaster to remain as realistic as possible, as did Friedrich Maurer in the Berlin production. He said “What, regret it?” with the mild incredulity of someone who observes a hero at a moment of weakness and smilingly recalls him to himself. At the end of the scene, however, he slightly overstressed the note of hearty, optimistic encouragement, as if he still had some faint private doubts.

  15. End of an Italian journey

  Everything has now been prepared for the ending. The abnormal has been recognized as such; normality once again comes into “its own.” The sacrificial rites have been performed; the survivors can get married off.

  Now that all is open and above-board we change the set for this last act, without drawing the curtain, against a sky still full of gently falling snow.

  The philosopher pats his discreet little tummy and slyly narrates his treachery: that accounts for the first couple. Fritz von Berg remains uneasy. Pacing the room with great strides he describes an Italian journey whose artistic experiences have become increasingly clouded by concern about his Gustchen. Fritz dare not open his letter from home, and when Pätus reads it out to him he collapses in a faint near the stove. Pätus runs for some cold water. Back in his easy chair he offers his “realistic” opinion of women. Karoline Pätus, entering at this point, knows no misfortune whose memory cannot be blotted out by a good cup of coffee. Staggering, Fritz hastens away from the wreckage of his friend to seek the tomb of his beloved.

  16. Engagement in the snow

  From the outset the second of the closing scenes dispels any fears on the part of the audience and of Fritz von Berg. The von Berg family is tragedy-proof. There is only one brush with the play’s more disturbing events: when the young lover, after intellectually reconciling himself to his beloved’s unfaithfulness, is led up to the cradle and sees the flesh and blood result. He hesitates for a second or two.

  17. Lise gets Läuffer

  Finally the most difficult of the endings: that for Läuffer. The scene is set on a Sunday morning and has many festive features. Lise is spreading a snowy-white tablecloth, while the two men concentrate on a dignified subject, the sermon. Läuffer sits and speaks with new-found authority, also with the false modesty that goes with it. None the less he has been robbed of his force. He absorbs the schoolmaster’s suggestions that the old Adam is still active in him with nothing more than distaste, Lise’s readiness to marry him without particular surprise.

  [Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe [henceforth BFA], vol. 24, pp. 357–71, also in Versuche 11 (1951); scenes 13–15 in Theaterarbeit. These and the following scene-by-scene notes were written during rehearsals with the Berliner Ensemble in 1950. It was Brecht’s intention to make a “Model Book” (an annotated photographic record of a given production) of this production. Insterburg, now called Chernyakhovsk, is near Königsberg (Kaliningrad) in the part of East Prussia annexed by the USSR at the end of the Second World War. The University of Halle near Leipzig was founded in 1694; it is now the Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg. The Swiss novelist-playwright-architect Max Frisch had seen much of Brecht during the year and a half which he spent based in Zurich.]

  On poetry and virtuosity

  For some time to come we shall need to talk about the poetry of a play and the virtuosity of its production, something that seemed of little urgency in the recent past. It seemed not merely to lack urgency but to be a positive distraction, and this less because the poetic element had been inadequately developed and appreciated than because it had been used as a pretext for maltreating reality, in that people imagined they would find poetry wherever reality was made to take a back seat. Lies masqueraded as inventiveness, imprecision as lavishness, slavery to prevailing forms as mastery of form, and so on. This made it necessary to test images of reality in the arts for their truth to reality, and to examine the artists’ intentions towards it. As a result we were forced to make a distinction between truth and poetry. More recently we have almost given up examining works of art from their poetic (artistic) aspect and made do with works lacking any appeal as poetry and productions from which virtuosity is absent. Such works and such productions may be effective on some level or other, but it cannot be a deep one, nor take a political direction. For it is a peculiarity of the means employed by the theatre that they communicate insights and impulses in the form of pleasures, and that the depth of the latter corresponds to the depth of the former.

  What follows is a description of some elements of virtuosity in the performance of The Tutor which accompany poetic factors in the play. The fact that the latter in turn accompany social factors is herewith to be noted, but should not hinder anybody from dwelling on those making for poetry and virtuosity.

  1

  The four bows executed by Läuffer, the first on seeing the two brothers, then a hurried pair of twin bows as he passes them, and a final one, spiced by a curse, to their backs, are, if precisely executed, a piece of virtuosity that gives rhythmical and plastic expression to Läuffer’s social subservience, choreographic training, and under-nourishment, not to mention the awkwardness peculiar to him. Setting the scene outside the garden gate of the privy councillor’s town residence is poetic, for it helps the spectator to become aware of the brothers’ morning glass, of their well-entrenched habits and their comfortable standard of living. With Shakespeare this might have been a bit too much; not so however with Lenz’s intimate, small-scale, comedy of mann
ers. None the less the setting is not designed to achieve illusion, this being impeded from the outset by the projecting of a hand-coloured steel engraving in the taste of that time.

  2

  The realization that people can be drawn together by poetry is itself poetic. A masterly description of the seductiveness that arises from the reading of a love poem can be found in the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno. A touch of this poetry, mildly alienated by comic allusions, should enter into the reading of Klopstock by the two lovers. A further factor is the way in which the couple’s position at the outset of the scene matches that at the end: both times they are seen in profile, at the same correct distance, except that the second time they have her father sitting between them; it is thanks to him that this distance has been restored. You may ask if such subtleties are noticed by the audience, but it is an unworthy question. Another subtle point is that the audience’s attention is drawn to Gustchen’s bed when her young lover leads her over to it to swear eternal devotion; in due course we shall see her lying in it with the tutor. At a first seeing of the play, the effect may simply be to suggest that they are only drawn to the bed by the thought of eventual unfaithfulness, but the ensuing tenth scene will become all the more effective, and when the play is seen a second time the former will also gain added significance—one should always reckon with a second visit.