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Ironic Significance. Part of the current vogue for Bertolt Brecht is that the whole world has bad dreams. His treatment of the great themes is not always secure. Love he customarily handles as parody, death as an animal calamity, and time as a metronome of disaster. He brings full authority perhaps only to man's inhumanity to man and to the theme of money, one of the great neglected subjects of modern fiction and drama. A hysteria of violence hovers constantly at the outskirts of his work. Today that seems timely; in time it may seem merely tedious.
But Brecht succeeded by failing. He wanted to hone his audiences to critical keenness, and he only managed to move them to tears and laughter. He wanted to make his theater a crucible of social change, and he merely convinced theatergoers of the tenacious durability of man's unchanging nature. If he had succeeded, as Biographer Martin Esslin points out, he would have been merely "a flat and boring party hack." Failing, he became a great moral puzzle, a seething controversy, and one of the most significant writers of the age.
*Critic Kenneth Tynan wonders whether Brechtian drama "is a gigantic tribute to motherhood." Brecht's men are usually drunks, cynics or compromisers, his heroines "mostly instruments of salvation . . . Did Brecht, as rumor insists, spurn his father and worship his mother? If so, it supports the old hypothesis that the men who adore their mothers lean toward the Left, while those who idolize their fathers lean toward the Right." Whether or not Tynan is correct about Brecht, he certainly has the makings of a fascinating psychological parlor game.