Collected Plays, Volume 4 (Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry & Prose) 8

12 January 1948

  In Sophocles the Antigone-Creon incident is the sequel to a victorious war: the tyrant (who is simply the ruler), in settling scores with personal enemies who have made victory more difficult for him, runs up against a humane custom and experiences the break-up of his family. In the new version the action starts from the crucial moment where ‘Very little’ is needed for victory and yet the most desperate force has to be employed, i.e. things that are beyond all measure prove to be absolutely essential. This commitment of the last moral reserves fails and hastens the collapse, which in any case had inevitably to follow from the overall constellation. The collapse thereby becomes, as it were, all the more total. The ruling house disintegrates when the son breaks with it (the Megareus-Haemon action repeats the Eteocles-Polynices action, i.e. the elimination of Creon’s children follows the elimination of his rival Oedipus’ children). Then his tame ideologist, the seer, drops out because he foresees disaster. All that is left for Antigone to do is to help the foe, which is the sum total of her moral contribution; she also had eaten for too long of the bread that is baked in the dark.

  18 January 1948

  It is no longer adequate just to hold up ancient Greek culture as the ultimate standard; the bourgeois classics were only interested in aesthetics. (Only took an aesthetic interest even in democracy.) Antigone in its entirety belongs with the barbaric horses’ skulls. Of course, the play has by no means yet undergone the process of thorough rationalisation.

  10 April 1948

  Everything rises in me when in discussions about the new version I hear Antigone being regarded as a moral play. Of course, what with the destruction of Thebes (and of Creon), it does come perilously close to the maxim ‘crime doesn’t pay’, but I still hope that the play shows nothing more (or less) than that enterprises that need too much violence readily fail. This amounts to no more than saying that impractical enterprises are impractical, and would be pretty banal, if it did not give an insight into a special sort of violence, namely the sort which derives from inadequacy, so that violence is seen to derive from stupidity. This brings the moral and the practical together, so that the former loses that sense of being absolute, rigid, enthroned in the supernatural.

  It is dangerous to impute a moral mission to art unless you are in a position to see the moral practices of a certain period in relative terms - and who might be capable of this? All the state can do is to come to terms with ‘immoral art’. The better the conditions, the easier it is to turn ‘immoral art’ to advantage. In art the main source of immorality is philistinism.

  [Journals, pp.377-88. The references are all to the collaborative work in the preparation of Antigone for performance in Chur. Brecht and Helene Weigel (who was to play Antigone) were in Zurich, where they ran into Hans Curjel, with whom Brecht had worked on the ‘Little’ Mahagonny in Baden-Baden in 1927 and who was now director of the municipal theatre at Chur. Caspar Neher, Brecht’s old schoolfriend, with whom he had worked before 1933 and with whom contact had now been re-established, had recently moved to Zurich as joint chief designer at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. Rehearsals for Antigone started in Zurich early in January, under the joint direction of Brecht and Neher, and the team moved to Chur on 16 January 1948. See also Introduction.

  With reference to 25 December 1947: the Manifesto was Brecht’s uncompleted project to recast The Communist Manifesto in hexameters. The Nehers’ son Georg had been reported missing on the Russian front on 8 April 1943.]

  LETTER TO STEFAN BRECHT

  Dear Steff,

  I’m sending you an adaptation of Antigone that I’ve done for Helli. We’re giving a kind of preview for Berlin in Chur, two hours from Zurich. I’ve used Hölderlin’s (relatively faithful) translation from the Greek; there’s something Hegelian about it that you’ll recognise and a Swabian popular Gestus that you probably won’t. (The ‘popular grammar’ extends even to the ultra-sophisticated choruses.) It’s my second attempt, following Edward, to develop a heightened stage language from classical elements. The reason for the changes, which obliged me to write whole new sections, is that I wanted to get rid of the Greek moira (destiny); in other words, I try to uncover the underlying popular legend. You’ll be best able to judge this experiment when you see what has been done with the choruses. - A piece of good news from Sweden: apparently the books are still there: (Neue Zeit, Karl Marx, Ilich, [i.e., Lenin], Machiavelli, Montaigne, Aristotle, Hegel, etc.) - If Galileo is done again in New York, I’d like you to see it again and write to me about it. And please make sure that Korsch gets tickets. - Just speak to Hambleton or Laughton. -And about the car, you should correspond with Elisabeth Hauptmann (c/o Lorre) directly. She wanted to sell the Buick for you and send you the money, but it seems she can’t get very much for it. -

  Cordially,

  b

  Zurich, December 1947

  [Letters, pp.442-3.]

  DRAFT OF A FOREWORD, 1947

  Sophocles’ Antigone is the decided rejection of tyranny in favour of democracy. It is a drama that intervenes polemically in contemporary Greek events: ‘If one man owns it that is not a state …’, ‘I’m there to love my fellow-beings, not hate them.’ (‘I live for love not hatred’, 1.489.)

  The tyrant Creon, who has driven his people into an unjust war, kills Antigone’s younger brother Polynices because he has quitted the battle after witnessing the fate of the older brother, Eteocles. In addition, he dishonours him utterly by ruling that his body may not be buried but must be left in the open air to be fed on by the birds. Any among the people who oppose this will be stoned. Antigone revolts against the judgement and intends to bury her brother. She discloses her intention to her sister Ismene. Ismene takes fright and warns Antigone:

  ISMENE: Sister, you will be caught in lawlessness.

  ANTIGONE: But not in faithlessness.

  Ismene beseeches her sister not to attempt an impossible opposition. All will be in vain, nothing can be done against the tyrant. But Antigone thinks otherwise and carries out her intention. Antigone is arrested and sentenced by Creon to a disgraceful death. Disapproval increases among the people. Creon has a mind to have all who oppose him killed. Creon’s son Haemon, betrothed to Antigone, sides with her and quarrels with his father. They part after heated exchanges. The blind seer Tiresias warns Creon and prophesies disaster. Creon, urged by the Chorus, now thinks to rescind the judgement, but the disaster has already occurred. Antigone is dead, Haemon has killed himself at her grave. Creon’s wife, the mother of Haemon, has likewise killed herself in despair. Cursing himself, Creon collapses.

  Brecht increases the contemporary relevance by making the war take an abrupt turn. The victory celebrations were a sham. The enemy meanwhile have regathered their forces and are now advancing victoriously on Thebes. The destruction of the city is inevitable. But Creon, if he must die himself, wishes the city of Thebes to be annihilated with him. And so he defends Thebes senselessly to the death.

  Argos, apparently defeated by Creon, summons up fresh energies. The women, the children, all take up arms, and Argos becomes a Stalingrad - the parallel is obvious. A terrible end for Creon’s army.

  [BFA 24, pp. 349-50. This draft emerged in collaboration with Caspar Neher but it was not in fact used.]

  ANTIGONE

  Come out from the shadows and walk

  Before us a while

  Friendly girl with the light step

  Of one who has made up her mind, a terror

  To the terrible.

  Girl turning away, I know

  You were afraid of dying but

  Still more afraid

  Of living unworthily.

  And you let the powerful off

  Nothing and with those confusing the issue

  You did no deals nor ever

  Forgot an insult and over wrongdoing

  There was no covering up.

  We salute you.

  [BFA 15, p.191. This poem was first published in the programme of the Chur producti
on in 1948.]

  MASTERFUL TREATMENT OF A MODEL

  (Foreword to the Antigone-Model)

  I

  Thanks to its total moral and material collapse our harrowed and harrowing country has no doubt acquired a vague appetite for novelty; moreover where the arts are concerned it is apparently being encouraged from various quarters to test out new ideas. But since there seems to be a good deal of confusion as to what is new and what is old, while fear that the old will return has become mixed with fear that the new will step in; and since moreover the conquered are always being told in general terms that only morally and intellectually do they need to get rid of their Nazism, artists would be well advised not to rely blindly on the assurance that new ideas are welcome. Yet art can only find its feet by going ahead, and it needs to do so in company with the advanced part of the population and not away from them. Together with them it must stop waiting to be acted upon, and must go on and act itself; it must make a start somewhere in the general ruin.

  It is not going to be at all easy for art to regain control of its technical equipment and extend it in new directions. The rapid decline of artistic methods under the Nazis seems to have taken place almost unnoticed. The damage done to theatre buildings is far more conspicuous than that done to the style of acting. This is partly because the former took place with the fall of the Nazi regime, but the latter during its rise. Even today people will speak of the ‘brilliant’ technique of the Goering-style theatre, as if such a technique could be taken over without bothering what direction its brilliance took. A technique which served to hide the causality at work in society can hardly be used to show it up. And it is high time for a theatre for inquisitive people.

  Bourgeois society, with its anarchic system of production, only becomes aware of its own laws of motion in a catastrophe: as Marx said, it is the roof falling in on its head that gives it its first introduction to the law of gravity. But mere catastrophe is a bad teacher. One learns hunger and thirst from it, but seldom hunger for truth and thirst for knowledge. No amount of illness will turn a sick man into a physician; neither the distant view nor close inspection makes an eye-witness into an expert. If the theatre is capable of showing the truth, then it must also be capable of making the sight of it a pleasure. How then can such a theatre be created? The difficulty about ruins is that the house has gone, but the site isn’t there either. And the architects’ plans, it seems, never get lost. This means that reconstruction brings back the old dens of iniquity and centres of disease. Fevered life claims to be particularly vital life; none steps so firmly as the consumptive who has lost all feeling in the soles of his feet. Yet the tricky thing about art is that however hopeless its affairs may seem, it has to conduct them with complete ease.

  Thus it may not be easy to create progressive art in the period of reconstruction. And this should be a challenge.

  2

  The Antigone story was picked for the present theatrical operation as providing a certain topicality of subject matter and posing some interesting formal questions. So far as the subject’s political aspect went, the present-day analogies emerged astonishingly powerfully as a result of the rationalisation process, but on the whole they were a handicap; the great character of the resister in the old play does not represent the German resistance fighters who necessarily seem most important to us. It was not the occasion for a poetic tribute to them; and this is all the more a pity because so little is now done to preserve their memory and so much to make people forget them. Not everyone will necessarily realise that they are not the subject in this case, but only he who does so will be able to summon the measure of strangeness needed if the really remarkable element in this Antigone play - the role of force in the collapse of the head of the state - is to be observed with profit. Even the prologue could only contribute by posing a point of actuality and outlining the subjective problem. The Antigone story then unrolls the whole chain of incidents objectively, on the unfamiliar level of the rulers. This possibility of objectively presenting a major state operation was due precisely to the fact (fatal in another respect) that the old play was historically so remote as to tempt nobody to identify himself with its principal figure. Here too its elements of epic form were a help, and provided something of interest to our theatre on their own account. Greek dramaturgy uses certain forms of alienation, notably interventions by the chorus, to try and rescue some of that freedom of calculation which Schiller is uncertain how to ensure.1 However, there can be no question, either through the Antigone story or on its behalf, of ‘conjuring up the spirit of antiquity’; philological interests cannot be taken into account. Even if we felt obliged to do something for a work like Antigone we could only do so by letting the play do something for us.

  3

  As it is not so much a new school of playwriting as a new way of performance being tried out on an old play, our new adaptation cannot be handed over in the usual way to theatres to-do what they like with. An obligatory model production has been worked out, which can be grasped from a collection of photographs accompanied by explanatory instructions. Such a model of course will stand or fall according to the ease with which it can be imitated and varied. Possibly the whole, or certain parts, may give no impression of life when reproduced; in that case the whole or the parts in question must be discarded. A model cannot depend on cadences whose charm is due to particular voices or on gestures and movements whose beauty springs from particular physical characteristics; that sort of thing cannot serve as a model, for it is not exemplary so much as inimitable. If something is to be usefully copied it must first be put forward for copying. What is actually achieved when the model is put to use can then be a mixture of the inimitable and the exemplary.

  The idea of making use of models is a clear challenge to the artists of a period that applauds nothing but what is ‘original’, ‘incomparable’, ‘never been seen before’, and demands what is ‘unique’. They may realise quite well that a model is not a blueprint, and yet find that their way of going to work gives them no help in the use of models. It is hard enough for them to hurry up and forget the examples of their youth; and now they have learnt to create everything bearing on their parts themselves, entirely from within the resources of the self. What, they will ask, is in any way creative about the use of models? The answer is that today’s division of labour has transformed creation in many important spheres. The act of creation has become a collective creative process, a continuum of a dialectical sort in which the original invention, taken on its own, has lost much of its importance. The initial invention of a model truly need not count for all that much, for the actor who uses it immediately makes his own personal contribution. He is free to invent variations on the model, that is to say such variations as will make the image of reality which he has to give truer and richer in its implications, or more satisfying artistically. The choreographic figures (positions, movements, groupings, etc.)1 can be treated either slavishly or masterfully; that is, masterfully only in so far as reality penetrates them freely. If the variations are undertaken in the right way they too take on the qualities of a model; the learner becomes the teacher and the model itself changes.

  For in truth the model is not set up in order to fix the style of performance; quite the contrary. The emphasis is on development: changes are to be provoked and to be made perceptible; sporadic and anarchic acts of creation are to be replaced by creative processes whose changes progress by steps or leaps.2 The model was worked out in a dozen and a half rehearsals at the municipal theatre in Chur, and must be regarded as by definition incomplete. The very fact that its shortcomings cry out for improvement should stimulate theatres to use it.

  4

  Neher’s stage for ‘Antigone’. Long benches, on which the actors can sit and wait for their cue, stand in front of a semicircle of screens covered in red-coloured rush matting. In the middle of these screens a gap is left, where the record turntable stands and is visibly operated; through this gap the actors can go o
ff when their part is done. The acting area is bounded by four posts, from which horses’ skulls hang suspended. In the left foreground is a board for props, with Bacchic masks on sticks, Creon’s laurel wreath made of copper, the millet bowl and the wine jar for Antigone and a stool for Tiresias. Subsequently Creon’s battle sword is hung up here by one of the Elders. On the right is a framework with a sheet of iron on which an Elder beats with his fist during the choral song ‘Spirit of joy, pride of the waters’. For the Prologue a white wall is lowered on wires. There are a door and a cupboard in it. A kitchen table and two chairs stand in front of it; a sack lies in the right foreground. At the beginning a board with the time and the place on it is lowered above the wall. There is no curtain.

  The reason why the actors sit openly on the stage and only adopt the attitudes proper to their parts once they enter the (very brilliantly lit) acting area is that the audience must not be able to think that it has been transported to the scene of the story, but must be invited to take part in the delivery of an ancient poem, irrespective how it has been restored.

  There were two plans for the stage. The first was that the actors’ benches should as it were represent the scene of the old poem. The screen behind them consisted of ox blood-coloured canvases reminiscent of sails and tents, and the posts with horses’ skulls stood in between. The acting area was simply to be brilliantly lit and marked out by little flags. This would have represented a visible separation of the original poem and its secularised version. We became more and more dissatisfied with this plan, until we eventually decided to situate the new part of the story also between the barbaric war emblems. As a third possibility one could cut the Prologue and replace the screens behind the benches by a board showing bomb damage in a modern city.

  Costumes and props. The men’s costumes were made of undyed sackcloth, the women’s of cotton. Creon’s and Haemon’s costumes had inserts of red leather. Antigone’s and Ismene’s were grey. Particular care was taken over the props; good craftsmen worked on them. This was not so that the audience or the actors should imagine that they were real, but simply so as to provide the audience and the actors with beautiful objects.