MacFormat 1996 July

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ MacFormat 1996 July / macformat-039.iso / DATABASE / SHARED.DIR / 01506_23.cap.txt < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1996-03-14 | 4.3 KB | 268 lines

@ Brecht knew himself to be an outsider from a young age. His first plays were anarchic and formless, full of drunken soldiers, pregnant mistresses, wind, rain, arguments and distant gunfire. He was angry, but it seems he had not yet figured out who he was angry with, or what about # Brecht dabbled for a while with 'Expressionism', a form of theatre where the emotional ups- and-downs of the hero are more important than the events. But he was already looking for something that would make theatre more than a passive form of entertainment # Brecht was abroad when the Nazis came to power in 1933, and decided not to go home. He immediately declared himself a political exile, and seemed delighted with this new status, as if banishment confirmed what he had always believed about himself: that he did not belong # In exile Brecht turned to poetry, perhaps because there was no point in writing plays while he was banished from the German- speaking world, as they could not be staged. By now he was a declared communist, and he used his poetry as a weapon to attack the Nazi regime # Brecht's first poems were cabaret songs (he used to sing them himself, strumming his guitar and wearing an old leather jacket). But his exile poems are more like political slogans, chalked on a wall: "It is night. Married couples/ Lie in their beds. The young women/ Will bear orphans." @ Brecht never abandoned the theatre, and some of his best plays were written in America during the war, among them Mother Courage and The Good Woman of Szechwan. To make money Brecht wrote film scripts for Hollywood, an activity which he detested # In The Good Woman of Szechwan a kindly Chinese girl becomes a storekeeper. To make a success of the store, she dresses as a man and pretends to be a hard-nosed businessman. Eventually this persona takes over: she has been corrupted by the logic of capitalism # In Mother Courage, as in all Brecht's epic plays, the audience is discouraged from losing itself in the performance. Stagecraft and theatrical illusion only muddy the issues. Epic theatre, said Brecht, should be detached - like sitting in an armchair reading a good book # Brecht's collaboration with the composer Kurt Weill was for a short time extremely productive. Weill put Brecht's poems to work by putting them to music. To them, this was the theatre of political commitment; others might call it propaganda # After the war Brecht, as a communist, found he was no longer welcome in America. So the eternal exile went home to Berlin in communist East Germany, (the GDR) where he founded a theatre. He died the grand old man of socialist drama - a role which did not well suit him @ The Beatles split was blamed by many on Yoko Ono. John doted on her, and Paul was deeply distrustful of her, But the two songwriters' paths had already diverged, and the worst that can be said of Yoko is that she hastened the group's demise # The once happy and fruitful Beatles partnership slid after the break- up into personal sniping and legal bickering. Lennon released a very poor song, How Do You Sleep, which was a bitter and vicious attack on Paul # After the Beatles fell apart the members moved on to other projects. Lennon moved to New York, Ringo Starr got interested in film, Harrison made some respectable albums in Britain , and McCartney, after a period of peace and quiet, re-emerged with what he called a working skiffle band - Wings # John Lennon was killed outside his home in New York. He had done little in the previous five years, but had just re-emerged with a new album. His death put paid to the perennial rumours that the Beatles were about to get back together # If prophetic photographs are anything to go by, it seems Lennon knew he would be the first Beatle to die. Sales in Beatles records naturally rocketed after his death, and with his corpus of work now complete, the appraisal of his legacy, with the Beatles and without them, could begin # Paul McCartney's solo output has remained impressive, but as with Lennon, the quality varied. Though both men strived to create a separate musical identity for themselves after the Beatles, neither could quite ever escape the shadow of their youthful moptopped selves