Brecht on Performance Brecht, Bertolt; Kuhn, Tom; Giles, Steve ...
2018, 2018-10-18
eBook
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.
This volume offers an examination of Brecht’s largely forgotten theatrical fragments of a life of David, written just after the Great War but prior to Brecht winning the Kleist Prize in 1922 and the ...acclaim that would launch his extraordinary career. David J. Shepherd and Nicholas E. Johnson take as their starting point Brecht’s own diaries from the time, which offer a vivid picture of the young Brecht shuttling between Munich and the family home in Augsburg, surrounded by friends, torn between women, desperate for success, and all the while with ‘David on the brain’. The analysis of Brecht’s David, along with his notebooks and diaries, reveals significant connections between the reception of the Biblical David and one of Germany’s most tumultuous cultural periods. Drawing on theatrical experiments conducted with an ensemble from Trinity College Dublin, this volume includes the first ever translation of the David fragments in English, an extensive discussion of the theatrical afterlife of David in the early twentieth century as well as new interdisciplinary insights into the early Brecht: a writer entranced by the biblical David and utterly committed to translating the biblical tradition into his own evolving theatrical idiom.
The threepenny opera Brecht, Bertolt; Manheim, Ralph; Willett, John ...
04/2015
eBook
This Student Edition of Brecht's satire on the capitalist society of the Weimar Republic features an extensiveintroduction and commentary that includes a plot summary, discussion ofthe context, ...themes, characters, style and language as well asquestions for further study and notes on words and phrases in the text.It is the perfect edition for students of theatre and literature.Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera,first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is avicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the WeimarRepublic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. It focuses on the feud between Macheaf - an amoral criminal - and his father in law, a racketeer who controls and exploits London's beggars and is intent on having Macheaf hanged. Despite the resistance by Macheaf's friend the Chief of Police, Macheaf is eventually condemned to hang, until in a comic reversal the queen pardons him and grants him a title and land. With Kurt Weill'sunforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attemptsto introduce jazz to the theatre - it became a popular hit throughoutthe western world. The text is presented in the trusted translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett.
Die vorliegenden Bände versammeln und kommentieren jene Briefe, die Bertolt Brecht während der Zeit seines Exils erhielt. Sie dokumentieren das intellektuelle Leben der 1930er und 1940er Jahre in ...Europa und Amerika sowie die persönliche Situation vieler Intellektueller und Künstler, darunter Walter Benjamin, Arnold Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Bloch, George Grosz sowie Heinrich und Thomas Mann. Die Briefe werden durch Indizes erschlossen.
Stage Fright Puchner, Martin
2002, 2003-04-01
eBook
Grounded equally in discussions of theater history, literary genre, and theory, Martin Puchner's Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama explores the conflict between avant-garde ...theater and modernism. While the avant-garde celebrated all things theatrical, a dominant strain of modernism tended to define itself against the theater, valuing lyric poetry and the novel instead. Defenders of the theater dismiss modernism's aversion to the stage and its mimicking actors as one more form of the old anti-theatrical prejudice. But Puchner shows that modernism's ambivalence about the theater was shared even by playwrights and directors and thus was a productive force responsible for some of the greatest achievements in dramatic literature and theater.
A reaction to the aggressive theatricality of Wagner and his followers, the modernist backlash against the theater led to the peculiar genre of the closet drama—a theatrical piece intended to be read rather than staged—whose long-overlooked significance Puchner traces from the theatrical texts of Mallarmé and Stein to the dramatic Circe chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. At times, then, the anti-theatrical impulse leads to a withdrawal from the theater. At other times, however, it returns to the stage, when Yeats blends lyric poetry with Japanese Nôh dancers, when Brecht controls the stage with novelistic techniques, and when Beckett buries his actors in barrels and behind obsessive stage directions. The modernist theater thus owes much to the closet drama whose literary strategies it blends with a new mise en scène. While offering an alternative history of modernist theater and literature, Puchner also provides a new account of the contradictory forces within modernism.
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