Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 5

  It was during that March that Brecht first met Charles Laughton, who was then living within walking distance in a street called Corona del Mar above the Pacific Coast Highway. Both men were friends of Berthold Viertel’s wife Salka (best known perhaps as Greta Garbo’s preferred script writer), and it seems to have been through her that they learnt to appreciate one another’s company. As Laughton’s biographer Charles Higham has put it, they found they had certain likes and dislikes in common:

  They both shared a sympathy and concern for ordinary people, a dislike of pomp and circumstance and the attitudes and actions of the European ruling class. They both disliked elaborate artifice in the theatre, as exemplified by the spangles-and-tinsel of Max Reinhardt’s stage and film productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream …

  Laughton had last acted in the theatre in 1934, and since playing Rembrandt in Alexander Korda’s 1936 film of that name (for which Brecht’s old friend Carl Zuckmayer wrote the script) he had had a surfeit of supporting roles in second- and third-rate Hollywood films. During the spring and summer of 1944 he read the rough translation of Brecht’s Schweik in the Second World War and greatly enjoyed it, while Brecht for his part wrote the long poem ‘Garden in Progress’ to commemorate, not without irony, the landslide which sent part of the Laughtons’ beautifully tended garden sliding down the cliff face to the road below. By then the actor had evidently learnt enough about Galileo, whether through Brecht’s description or from the Vesey and Reyher translations, to decide that it might well be the masterpiece to carry him back to the live stage. With Brecht’s agreement h^ now commissioned a fresh translation by a young writer called Brainerd Duffield, who had been working with Alfred Dóblin and other German exiles employed by MGM. By the end of November Duffield and his contemporary Emerson Crocker had once again translated Brecht’s original script and produced a third text which both Laughton and the Brechts evidently approved. A fortnight later actor and playwright together were getting down to what the former terms ‘systematic work on the translation and stage version of the Life of the Physicist Galileo’. Whatever the original intention, it was in effect to be a new play.

  * * *

  Brecht later called the work with Laughton a ‘zweijáhriger Spass’, a two-year escapade, and undoubtedly it covers more paper than did any other of his writings, so that altogether it represents a prodigal expenditure of both men’s time. But he also saw it as the classic collaboration between a great dramatist and a great actor, and the loving account which he gives in ‘Building up a part’ (p. 206 ff.) seems to have been filtered through a warm Californian haze rather than the wintry greys of Berlin. Inevitably there were long interruptions before a first script was ready. From February to May 1945 Laughton was off playing in the pirate film Captain Kidd (Brecht meantime consoling himself by trying to put the Communist Manifesto into Lucretian hexameters); then in June and July Brecht was in New York for a none too successful production of The Private Life of the Master Race in Eric Bentley’s translation, directed initially by Piscator and finally by Viertel on Brecht’s intervention. Generally however they worked as described by Brecht, with him reshaping the play in a mixture of German and English – his typescript drafts contain many instances of this, of which one is cited on p. 237 – and both men then trying to get the English working right. This reshaping often followed Laughton’s suggestions, which went much further than the basic cutting and streamlining which were his most obvious contribution. Thus it was he who proposed the elimination of the Doppone character (see p. 239), the ‘positive entry’ of the iron founder in scene 2, the argument between Ludovico and Galileo in the sunspot scene and the shifting of the handing-over of the Discorsi so that Galileo’s great speech of self-abasement should come after it and offset it. Brecht too worked to make this self-abasement seem more of a piece with Galileo’s concern for his own comforts, which were now to include thinking. In this, as in the new emphasis on Galileo’s sensuality, he was aided by Laugh-ton’s character, of which Eric Bentley has written that

  It is unlikely that anyone again will combine as he did every appearance of intellectual brilliance with every appearance of physical self-indulgence.

  If the 1938 version derived its political relevance from the need to smuggle the truth out of Nazi Germany, this new version was given an extra edge of topicality by the dropping of the first atomic bomb on 6 August 1945. Not that any significant change was needed apart from the addition of the passage about ‘a universal cry of fear’ in the penultimate scene. The notion of a Hippocratic oath for scientists had still to be worked in. So before leaving the US Brecht drafted the relevant passage (see p. 270), which could indeed have been in his mind from the inception of the play, the idea itself having been put forward by Lancelot Law White in Nature in 1938 and discussed at the time in an editorial in the New York Times.

  On 1 December 1945 the new, ‘American’ text was complete enough for Laughton to read it to the Brechts, Eisler, Reichen-bach, Salka Viertel and other friends. About a week later he also read it to Orson Welles, whom both he and Brecht seem already to have had in mind for some while as the right director for the production towards which they were working. Welles instantly accepted the job, and a few days after that the three men saw Laughton’s agents Berg-Allenberg to discuss whether to open in the spring or the summer. This question was bound up with their choice of producer, which seems to have veered initially between Welles himself, the film impresario Mike Todd and Elisabeth Bergner’s husband Paul Czinner, for whom Brecht was already working on the Duchess of Malfi adaptation. Czinner was not congenial to Laughton, and once the idea of a spring production was abandoned he dropped out. Welles for his part apparently disliked Brecht; nevertheless for a time the intention was that he and Todd should combine forces; then a mixture of uncertainty about dates and dislike of the kind of teamwork proposed by Laughton and Brecht made Welles drop out after the middle of 1946, leaving Todd as sole producer. After that various directors were suggested: Elia Kazan, who had a particular appeal for Brecht because he did not claim to know all the answers; Harold Clurman, whom Brecht respected as ‘an intelligent critic and interested in theoretical issues’ but saw primarily as a ‘Stanislavsky man’ unlikely to let him have any say. He even inquired about Alfred Lunt. Meantime a great deal of detailed revision of the new Brecht—Laughton text went on, with Brecht and Reyher totally overhauling it in New York, then Laughton and Brecht again reworking it in California. Versions of the ballad-singer’s song were made by Reyher and by Abe Burrows (of Guys and Dolls fame) while the inter-scene verses seem to have involved a whole host of collaborators including Brecht himself and his daughter Barbara; the only programme credit, however, for the ‘lyrics’ went to a Santa Monica poet called Albert Brush. The eventual director chosen was Joseph Losey, who had met Brecht in Moscow in 1935 and thereafter made his name with the Living Newspaper programmes of the Federal Theatre. Finally Todd too dropped out after offering (in Losey’s words) to ‘dress the production in Renaissance furniture from the Hollywood warehouses’, an idea that was unacceptable to Brecht, Laughton and Losey alike. With this the hope of any kind of production in 1946 disappeared.

  Briefly Brecht hoped that he and Losey might be able to stage a try-out at Berkeley under the auspices of Henry Schnitzler, son of the Austrian playwright, but time was too short. Instead the three partners decided to turn to a new smaller management headed by Norman Lloyd and John Houseman, who were then about to take over the Coronet Theatre on La Ciénega Boulevard, Los Angeles. They agreed to put on Galileo as their second production, with the ‘extremely decent’ (said Brecht) T. Edward Hambleton as its principal backer. Though Brecht was unable to get his old collaborator Caspar Neher over from Europe as he wished, the substitute designer Robert Davison accepted his and Laughton’s ideas for an unmonumental, non-naturalistic setting; Helene Weigel helped with the costumes. Eisler (who actually preferred the first version of the play) wrote the music in a fortnight; Lotte Goslar did
the choreography. Rehearsals were scheduled to start at the end of May 1947, when Laughton would have finished a film; the opening would be on 1 July. Though this had to be put off till the last day of the month everything otherwise seems – amazingly enough – to have gone according to plan. Losey not only justified Reyher’s recommendation of him –

  He knows casting, has the feel for it; he knows what to do with actors; he can get a crowd sense without numbers, and movement that isn’t just confusion, and keep the whole of a play in mind.

  – but worked so closely with Brecht that the latter ever afterwards treated the production as his own. Laughton, exceptionally nervous before the première, resisted any temptation to overact, and concentrated on bringing out the contradictory elements with which they had enriched Galileo’s character; the one point that still resisted him, according to Brecht, being the logic of the deep self-abasement manifested in his ‘Welcome to the gutter’ speech near the end of the play. Not that such refinements would have been particularly appreciated by the critics, for both Variety and the New York Times complained that the production was too flat and colourless. Charlie Chaplin too – who never really knew what to make of Brecht – sat next to Eisler at the opening and dined with him afterwards; he found that the play was not theatrical enough and said it should have been mounted differently. ‘When I told him’, said Eisler later,

  that Brecht never wants to ‘mount’ things, he simply couldn’t understand.

  To Helia Wuolijoki in Finland Losey would write after the New York production that

  working with Brecht has spoilt me for any other kind of theatre …

  And from then on he was lost to the cinema. For Brecht himself however it was certainly the most important and satisfying theatrical occasion since he first went into exile in 1933:

  The stage and the production were strongly reminiscent of the Schiffbauerdamm Theatre in Berlin; likewise the intellectual part of the audience.

  So he wrote to Reyher (Letter 543). Whether or not it played to such full houses as he later claimed, the whole achievement was an astonishing tribute to the actor’s courage, the director’s commitment and the writer’s relentless perfectionism: one of the great events in Brecht’s life.

  * * *

  In the long struggle to stage the ‘American’ version it might seem that Brecht hardly noticed that the Second World War was over. Thus his poem to Laughton ‘concerning the work on the play The Life of Galileo’ (Poems 1913–1956, p. 405):

  Still your people and mine were tearing each other to pieces when we

  Pored over those tattered exercise books, looking

  Up words in dictionaries, and time after time

  Crossed out our texts and then

  Under the crossings-out excavated

  The original turns of phrase. Bit by bit –

  While the housefronts crashed down in our capitals –

  The façades of language gave way. Between us

  We began following what characters and actions dictated:

  New text.

  Again and again I turned actor, demonstrating

  A character’s gestures and tone of voice, and you

  Turned writer. Yet neither I nor you

  Stepped outside his profession.

  In fact however he had begun to prepare his return to Germany as early as 1944 (when the FBI reported him visiting the Czech consulate for the purpose), and in December 1945 he wrote in his journal, ‘maybe I’ll no longer be here, next autumn’. The Galileo discussions apart, this was the beginning of a curiously blank year in Brecht’s biography (see Journals, editorial note to 5 January 1946), by the end of which he had had some kind of invitation to work in the Soviet sector of Berlin, once again at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Early in 1947 he was trying to organise a common front with Piscator and Friedrich Wolf (who was already back there) with a view to rehabilitating the Berlin theatre; by March he and Weigel had got their papers to go to Switzerland. The machinations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (from May onwards) thus had less effect on his movements than is sometimes thought. Hanns Eisler was interrogated by one of their subcommittees that month and the FBI file on Brecht reopened, while Eisler’s brother Gerhart was on trial during much of the Galileo rehearsals; finally Brecht himself appeared before the committee a day or two before leaving for Switzerland in September. But these words did probably affect the fortunes of the New York production, which Hambleton had delayed (according to Higham) in order to add the ‘passion, excitement, colour’ which the critics had felt to be lacking. Further cuts were made there to give us the text as we now print it (see the appendix, p. 3 3 3 ff.), the odd facetious line was worked in; the cast was entirely new. Again however the reviews were bad, Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times dismissing the production as ‘stuffed with hokum’. ‘The New York press’, noted Brecht in Zurich,

  seems to have missed exactly what laughton’s catholic friend missed in GALILEO: a scientist agonising under duress whom we can empathise with, well, galileo’s bad conscience is shown in right proportion in the play, but this is not nearly enough for the bourgeoisie; having come to power it wishes to see the higher spiritual movements of those whom it compels to act against their consciences displayed larger than life so as to embellish the overall picture of their world.

  The run was a very short one – six performances, suggests the 1988 edition. Higham blames the difficulty of finding another theatre to which to transfer. But Laughton’s earlier biographer Kurt Singer gave a somewhat different interpretation, writing (with an exaggeration indicative of the temper of those times) that

  The trouble lay in the political affiliations of the playwright. Berthold Brecht was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist. On the point of being deported from the United States for his Communist activities, he escaped and turned up again in East Germany, where be became the Soviet’s pet author, supervising the literary life of the Soviet-controlled zone and turning out odes to Stalin on the various state holidays. The musical score for the play on Galileo had been composed by Hanns Eisler, another convinced Communist who had composed many propaganda songs, including The Comintern March. Several actors in the cast turned out to be Communists too …

  Whether or not this put Laughton himself off the play, as Singer suggests, Brecht continued to count on the actor’s collaboration in a proposed film version to be made in Italy. The producer who had initiated this scheme was Rod E. Geiger, who apparently had funds in that country as a result of his earnings on Rossellini’s Open City. Negotiations continued while Brecht was in Switzerland, and a scheme was worked out with the approval of Laughton and his agents by which the former would come to London for a production of the play around the end of 1948, after which work on the film would follow. Brecht and Reyher would write the script, which Geiger felt must give more emphasis to the relationship between Virginia and her fiance Ludovico. However, everything was conditional on Laughton’s involvement, and he blew hot and cold, his own nervousness of Communist associations being no doubt aggravated by the warnings of his agent. So it all fell through – possibly prompting Brecht to the satirical Obituary for Ch.L’ which he wrote around this time (Poems 1913–1956, p. 418):

  Speak of the weather

  Be thankful he’s dead

  Who before he had spoken

  Took back what he said.

  At any rate this put paid for the moment to all further plans, since the play could hardly be staged by Brecht’s own company, the Berliner Ensemble, till they had a suitable actor and a revised German text. Brecht himself in Zurich had made a start and translated about half the Laughton text; he seems to have discussed a Berlin production outside the programme of that company, with Kortner or Steckel in the title part. Then in 1953 he set his collaborators (Hauptmann, Besson, Berlau) to work translating and expanding the ‘American’ version so as to include certain elements of that of 1938, notably the plague scenes and the great introductory speech about the ‘new time’ in sce
ne 1. He then went over the results himself, also adding German versions of the ballad, the poems and the inter-scene verses. In 1955 all this but for the verses was given its premiere in Cologne in West Germany, after which he at last – in the final year of his life – began preparing to stage the play with the Berliner Ensemble.

  In ten years a lot had changed. The text had grown longer by half, the production envisaged (with Neher as designer) was more lavish, there was no actor of Laughton’s calibre available. Brecht himself was to direct it, but he could only conduct rehearsals from mid-December up to the end of March 1956 when he became too ill to go on. As Galileo he cast his old Communist friend Ernst Busch, who had been in The Mother, Kuhle Wampe and the Threepenny Opera film before 1933, had sung Brecht—Eisler songs to the troops in Spain, been interned by the French, then handed over to the Gestapo and wounded in the bombing of Berlin. Since returning to the German stage Busch had tended to specialise in cunning or lovable rogues: Mephisto and lago for the Deutsches Theater, Azdak and the Cook (in Mother Courage) for Brecht. A much less intellectual actor than Laughton, he found it even more difficult to alienate the audience’s sympathies at the end of the play; and when Erich Engel took over the production after Brecht’s death he was allowed to present the handing-over of the Discorsi as a piece of justified foxiness which made his recantation ultimately forgiveable. Brecht himself had underlined two points in connection with this production: the first, his view that the recantation was an absolute crime (see p. 205), the second, that Galileo’s line in scene 9 ‘My object is not to establish that I was right but to find out if I am’ is the most important sentence in the play. Others have stressed that the new version followed the manufacture and testing of the hydrogen bomb, so that the social responsibility of the scientist became a particularly topical theme. It is difficult however to see this play as a member of an East European audience without feeling that it is above all about scientific enquiry and the human reason. For the parallels are too clear: the Catholic Church is the Communist Party, Aristotle is Marxism—Leninism with its incontrovertible scriptures, the late ‘reactionary’ pope is Joseph Stalin, the Inquisition the KGB. Obviously Brecht did not write it to mean this, and if he had seen how the local context prompted this interpretation he might have been less keen for the production to go on. But as things turned out it proved to be among the most successful of all his plays in the Communist world.