SEVEN PLAYS (587 pp.) — Bertolt Brecht—Grove ($8.50).
Most major playwrights leave an unmistakable identifying mark on their work. It may be smaller than theme or plot or character; often it is apt to be a recurring vignette, a typical moment. In Greek tragedy, that moment is the hero smiting his brow, discovering a new wrinkle in Fate's design. The Shakespearean moment, in the tragedies, is the restoration of order after individual or civil turmoil; in the comedies, it is the lover's mistaken identity. In Ibsen, it is self-doubt besetting the stolid bourgeois; in Strindberg, it is a shrill cry of female hysteria; in Shaw, it is paradoxical argument overturning a pose. Germany's late Bertolt Brecht, one of the 20th century's remarkable playwrights, has his own typical moment. In play after play, through changing locales, characters and moods, the Brechtian moment is man selling his fellow man.
The formula is almost completely predictable. If a woman in a Brecht play tells a man that she loves him, the odds are overwhelming that within minutes she will turn whore or he pimp; if someone puts money in his pocket, probably stolen, someone else will steal it; if a character speaks of honor, loyalty, progress—and particularly religion—chances are that he is merely masking a corrupt and greedy deal. This kind of unrelieved, often naive cynicism, heavily tinged with Marxism, has defeated many another writer. But at his best Brecht has risen above it and fashioned a rich, varied, often hilarious dramatic world in which the sold souls do not always stay bought, the villains do not necessarily stay black, and humanity in the end—apparently against the author's will—conquers ideology.
Body German. Since his death in 1956, Brecht has become a worldwide vogue. In West Germany, he has displaced Shaw in frequency of production, and ranks after Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller. East Germany lavishly maintains his personal repertory company, the Berliner Ensemble, with its perfectionist troupe led by Brecht's widow. Paris audiences have been flocking to The Good Woman of Setzuan and Arturo Ui. London is temporarily Brechtless but saw four of his plays last season. A five-year off-Broadway run of The Threepenny Opera not long ago chalked up a New York theater record by passing the old Oklahoma! run (2,248 performances). Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities is now running in a modest but successful production at off-Broadway's Living Theatre. On the critical front, his personality and drama have been brilliantly mapped in two books: Brecht: The Man and His Work by Martin Esslin (Doubleday), and The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht by John Willett (Methuen). In these Seven Plays, Critic Eric Bentley, a longtime Brecht devotee and translator, has put together a varied sampling of the playwright's work and written an incisive preface.
Even in German, Brecht plays far better than he reads, and in translation, the language gap cannot be closed. Brecht fashioned such a personal idiom in German that his language has been called "a function of the body." The present translations need more body English. Even so, the volume is an excellent introduction to Brecht's restlessly animated evocation of life, in which his puppets—numberless versions of Everyman—dance to the Threepenny tune of Jonathan Peachum: