Berliner Ensemble Adaptations

by Bertolt Brecht

  B. Careful.

  R. You mean, this is a war of self-defence.

  P. That doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing here as usually in our discussions and judgements. These wars led to the unification of Italy.

  R. Under Rome.

  B. Under democratic Rome.

  W. That had got rid of its Coriolanuses.

  B. Rome of the people’s tribunes.

  P. Here is what Plutarch says about what happened after Marcius’ death: “First the Volsces began to quarrel with the Aequi, their friends and allies, over the question of the supreme command, and violence and death resulted. They had marched out to meet the advancing Romans, but almost completely destroyed one another. As a result the Romans defeated them in battle.…”

  R. I.e., Rome without Marcius was not weaker, but stronger.

  B. Yes, it’s just as well not only to have read the play right through before starting to study the beginning, but also to have read the factual accounts of Plutarch and Livy, who were the dramatist’s sources. But what I meant by “careful” was: one can’t just condemn wars without going into them any further, and it won’t even do to divide them into wars of aggression and wars of defence. The two kinds merge into one another, for one thing. And only a classless society on a high level of production can get along without wars. Anyhow this much seems clear to me: Marcius has got to be shown as a patriot. It takes the most tremendous events—as in the play—to turn him into a deadly enemy of his country.

  R. How do the plebeians react to the news of the war?

  P. We’ve got to decide that ourselves; the text gives no clue.

  B. And unhappily our own generation is particularly well qualified to judge. The choice is between letting the news come like a thunderbolt that smashes through everyone’s defences, or else making something of the fact that it leaves them relatively unmoved. We couldn’t possibly leave them unmoved without underlining how strange and perhaps terrible that is.

  P. We must make it have tremendous effects, because it so completely alters the situation, if for no other reason.

  W. Let’s assume then that at first the news is a blow to them all.

  R. Even Marcius? His immediate reaction is to say he’s delighted.

  B. All the same we needn’t make him an exception. He can say his famous sentence. “I’m glad on’t; then we shall ha’ means to vent/Our musty superfluity,” once he has recovered.

  W. And the plebeians? It won’t be easy to exploit Shakespeare’s lacuna so as to make them seem speechless. Then there are still other questions. Are they to greet their new tribunes? Do they get any advice from them? Does their attitude towards Marcius change at all?

  B. We shall have to base our solution on the fact that there is no answer to these points; in other words, they have got to be raised. The plebeians must gather round the tribunes to greet them, but stop short of doing so. The tribunes must want to lay down a line, but stop short of it. The plebeians must stop short of adopting a new attitude to Marcius. It must all be swallowed up by the new situation. The stage direction that so irritates us, “Citizens steal away,” simply represents the change that has taken place since they came on stage (“Enter a company of mutinous citizens with clubs, staves and other weapons”). The wind has changed, it’s no longer a favourable wind for mutinies; a powerful threat affects all alike, and as far as the people goes this threat is simply noted in a purely negative way.

  R. You advised us in our analysis to make a note to record our discomfort.

  B. And our admiration of Shakespeare’s realism. We have no real excuse to lag behind Plutarch, who writes of the base people’s “utmost readiness” for the war. It is a new union of the classes, which has come about in no good way, and we must examine it and reconstitute it on the stage.

  W. To start with, the people’s tribunes are included in the new union; they are left hanging useless in mid-air, and they stick out like sore thumbs. How are we to create this visible unity of two classes which have just been fighting one another out of these men and their irreconcilable opponent Marcius, who has suddenly become so vitally needed, needed for Rome as a whole?

  B. I don’t think we’ll get any further by going about it naïvely and waiting for bright ideas. We shall have to go back to the classic method of mastering such complex events. I marked a passage in Mao Tse-tung’s essay “On Contradiction.” What does he say?

  R. That in any given process which involves many contradictions there is always a main contradiction that plays the leading, decisive part; the rest are of secondary, subordinate significance.—One example he gives is the Chinese Communists’ willingness, once the Japanese attacked, to break off their struggle against Chiang Kai-shek’s reactionary régime. Another possible example is that when Hitler attacked the USSR even the émigré White Russian generals and bankers were quick to oppose him.

  W. Isn’t that a bit different?

  B. A bit different but also a bit the same thing. But we must push on. We’ve got a contradictory union of plebeians and patricians, which has got involved in a contradiction with the Volsces next door. The second is the main contradiction. The contradiction between plebeians and patricians, the class struggle, has been put into cold storage by the emergence of the new contradiction, the national war against the Volsces. It hasn’t disappeared though. (The people’s tribunes “stick out like sore thumbs.”) The tribunate came about as a result of the outbreak of war.

  W. But in that case how are we to show the plebeian-patrician contradiction being overshadowed by the main Roman-Volscian contradiction, and how can we do it in such a way as to bring out the disappearance of the new plebeian leadership beneath that of the patricians?

  B. That’s not the sort of problem that can be solved in cold blood. What’s the position? Starving men on one side, armed men on the other. Faces flushed with anger now changing colour once more. New lamentations will drown the old. The two opposed parties take stock of the weapons they are brandishing against one another. Will these be strong enough to ward off the common danger? It’s poetic, what’s taking place. How are we going to put it across?

  W. We’ll mix up the two groups: there must be a general loosening-up, with people going from one side to the other. Perhaps we can use the incident when Marcius knocks into the patrician Lartius on his crutches and says: “What, art thou stiff? stand’st out?” Plutarch says in connection with the plebeians’ revolt: “Those without any means were taken bodily away and locked up, even though covered with scars from the battles and ordeals suffered in campaigns for the fatherland. They had conquered the enemy, but their creditors had not the least pity for them.” We suggested before that there might be a disabled man of this sort among the plebeians. Under the influence of the naïve patriotism that’s so common among ordinary people, and so often shockingly abused, he could come up to Lartius, in spite of his being a member of the class that has so maltreated him. The two war victims could recall their common share in the last war; they could embrace, applauded by all, and hobble off together.

  B. At the same time that would be a good way of establishing that it is generally a period of wars.

  W. Incidentally, do you feel a disabled man like this could perhaps prevent our group from standing as pars pro toto?

  B. Not really. He would represent the ex-soldiers.—For the rest, I think we could follow up our idea about the weapons. Cominius as consul and commander-in-chief could grin as he tested those home-made weapons designed for civil war and then gave them back to their owners for use in the patriotic one.

  P. And what about Marcius and the tribunes?

  B. That’s an important point to settle. There mustn’t be any kind of fraternization between them. The new-found union isn’t complete. It’s liable to break at the junction points.

  W. Marcius can invite the plebeians condescendingly, and with a certain contempt, to follow him to the Capitol, and the tribunes can encourage the disabled man to accost Titus Lartius, but Mar
cius and the tribunes don’t look at each other, they turn their backs on one another.

  R. In other words both sides are shown as patriots, but the conflict between them remains plain.

  B. And it must also be made clear that Marcius is in charge. War is still his business—especially his—much more than the plebeians’.

  R. Looking at the play’s development and being alert to contradictions and their exact nature has certainly helped us in this section of the story. What about the character of the hero, which is also something that must be sketched out, and in precisely this section of the story?

  B. It’s one of those parts which should not be built up from his first appearance but from a later one. I would say a battle-scene for Coriolanus, if it hadn’t become so hard for us Germans to represent great wartime achievements after two idiotic wars.

  P. You want Marcius to be Busch, the great people’s actor who is a fighter himself. Is that because you need someone who won’t make the hero too likeable?

  B. Not too likeable, and likeable enough. If we want to generate appreciation of his tragedy we must put Busch’s mind and personality at the hero’s disposal. He’ll lend his own value to the hero, and he’ll be able to understand him, both the greatness and the cost of him.

  P. You know what Busch feels. He says he’s no bruiser, nor an aristocratic figure.

  B. He’s wrong about aristocratic figures, I think. And he doesn’t need physical force to inspire fear in his enemies. We mustn’t forget a “superficial” point: if we are going to represent half the Roman plebs with five to seven men and the entire Roman army with something like nine—and not just for lack of actors—we can’t very well use a sixteen-stone Coriolanus.

  W. Usually you’re for developing characters step by step. Why not this one?

  B. It may be because he doesn’t have a proper development. His switch from being the most Roman of the Romans to becoming their deadliest enemy is due precisely to the fact that he stays the same.

  P. Coriolanus has been called the tragedy of pride.

  R. Our first examination made us feel the tragedy lay, both for Coriolanus and for Rome, in his belief that he was irreplaceable.

  P. Isn’t that because the play only comes to life for us when interpreted like this, since we find the same kind of thing here and feel the tragedy of the conflicts that result from it?

  B. Undoubtedly.

  W. A lot will depend on whether we can show Coriolanus, and what happens to and around him, in such a light that he can hold this belief. His usefulness has got to be beyond all doubt.

  B. A typical detail: as there’s so much question of his pride, let’s try to find out where he displays modesty, following Stanislavsky’s example, who asked the man playing the miser to show him the point at which he was generous.

  W. Are you thinking of when he takes over command?

  B. Something like. Let’s leave it at that for a start.

  P. Well, what does the scene teach us, if we set it out in such a form?

  B. That the position of the oppressed classes can be strengthened by the threat of war and weakened by its outbreak.

  R. That lack of a solution can unite the oppressed class and arriving at a solution can divide it, and that such a solution may be seen in a war.

  P. That differences in income can divide the oppressed class.

  R. That soldiers, and war victims even, can romanticize the war they survived and be easy game for new ones.

  W. That the finest speeches cannot wipe away realities, but can hide them for a time.

  R. That “proud” gentlemen are not too proud to kowtow to their own sort.

  P. That the oppressors’ class isn’t wholly united either.

  B. And so on.

  R. Do you think that all this and the rest of it can be read in the play?

  B. Read in it and read into it.

  P. Is it for the sake of these perceptions that we are going to do the play?

  B. Not only. We want to have and to communicate the fun of dealing with a slice of illuminated history. And to have first-hand experience of dialectics.

  P. Isn’t the second point a considerable refinement, reserved for a handful of connoisseurs?

  B. No. Even with popular ballads or the peepshows at fairs the simple people (who are so far from simple) love stories of the rise and fall of great men, of eternal change, of the ingenuity of the oppressed, of the potentialities of mankind. And they hunt for the truth that is “behind it all.”

  [From Versuche 15, 1957; reprinted in BFA, vol. 23, pp. 386–402, and translated in Brecht on Theatre, 1964. This essay in dialogue form, that is not an accurate transcription of a discussion, was written in 1954, after the project had apparently been put into mothballs, then used by Brecht as the opening (and most substantial) item of the mimeographed collection of new theoretical writings which he made in 1956 under the title Dialectics in the Theater. Of the four participants B. is of course Brecht himself, while P. is Peter Palitzsch, R. Käthe Rülicke, and W. Manfred Wekwerth, the eventual director of the Berliner Ensemble production and also of the 1971 National Theatre production in London, which attempted to show that virtually the same interpretation of the play could be based on the original text.

  P.’s mention of “famous ancestors” refers to Brecht’s poem, “Literature will be scrutinized.” Ernst Busch, whom Brecht expected to cast as Coriolanus, played Galileo and other leading parts (see Volume 5, p. xix) for the Ensemble, but Coriolanus was finally played by Brecht’s son-in-law Ekkehard Schall.]

  Editorial Note

  Adapting Shakespeare

  Brecht seems to have used Coriolanus as something of a training-ground for the younger dramaturgs and assistant directors, some of whose names appear in the note to the study of the first scene. They were divided into groups of two or three, says Peter Palitzsch, and set to analyse the story, check the translation, and suggest cuts and changes. It was in answer to the very radical nature of some of their proposals that Brecht made his dictum about amending Shakespeare, the emphasis in his answer being of course on the word “can.” A great deal of his concept of the dispensability of the hero and the role to be given the plebeians was in fact already there in Shakespeare’s text, so that gradually more modest ideas prevailed and the original play began to re-emerge. However, he felt that the play could not be left entirely unamended so long as the masses lacked self-awareness and their sense of history remained undeveloped, with the result that there are still some major alterations in the early outline plan of the play printed above (pp. 448–449): notably Coriolanus’ criticism of his troops in I, 4; the fact that the demand for grain in III, 1 is not just past history but something to be dealt with now; the whole business of arming the people in Act V (though Shakespeare’s Sicinius provides a peg for this by his allusion in V, 1 to “the instant army we can make”); finally the unenthusiastic reception of Volumnia in V, 5 and the addition of the last scene.

  The other notes which we print underline his intentions with regard to I, 1 and to IV, 4 (his eventual IV, 3), and most of the proposed alterations were in fact carried out. They would certainly have been more extensive if he had not preferred to leave it open what he would do to the battle scenes in Act I; thus Elisabeth Hauptmann’s note when the play was finally published three years after his death in 1956:

  It was Brecht’s intention to combine scenes 4 to 10 of Shakespeare’s play to make one big battle scene, which would have formed his Act I, scene 3 [or scene 4 in the outline plan for the Berliner Ensemble acting version]. Brecht wanted to write this scene during the rehearsals, since he felt it essential to work out the text simultaneously with the positionings and movements.

  Indeed Manfred Wekwerth and Joachim Tenschert did just this when they eventually staged the play for the Berliner Ensemble in September 1964; (they also restored a shortened version of I, 2). In the published text, however, which our translation necessarily follows, the original seven scenes have been merely re
numbered 3a, 3b, etc., but are otherwise left as they stood in the old standard Schlegel-Tieck translation, here rendered in a modified version of Shakespeare’s English.

  This translation by Dorothea Tieck was the one from which the adaptors worked, and to some extent it survives in Brecht’s final text even apart from the scenes in question. His was, in fact, not so much a new translation as a radical reworking of the old one, which underwent much the same roughening-up process as did A. W. Heymel’s version of Marlowe’s Edward II some thirty years earlier. Many of the Tieck lines and phrases have been taken over unchanged or still remain recognizable; some passages have been paraphrased and condensed; others have been entirely rewritten, sometimes for dramaturgical reasons, sometimes to bring them closer to the English. Thus Cominius’ report in II, 2, which Tieck for some reason made finish up “and strikes with sudden reinforcement/The city like divine might” returns to something very near the original “And with a sudden re-enforcement struck/Corioli like a planet,” while the “heart-hardening spectacles” of Coriolanus’ speech on leaving Rome have become, not Tieck’s “herzhärtend Schauspiel” but “herzhärtende Spektakel.” It could also be more “gestic” (in Brecht’s sense) to restore something like Shakespeare’s word order and rhythms, as in Coriolanus’ raging speech after his banishment in III, 3 (Brecht’s III, 2), starting “You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate,” where Brecht’s version is altogether more forceful, rendering the final “There is a world elsewhere” not by Tieck’s lilting “Noch anderswo gibt’s eine Welt” but by an abrupt, challenging “s’gibt/Noch eine Welt woanders.”

  Brecht’s cuts, which include the whole of Shakespeare’s II, 2 and V, 5, are no more drastic than in any other modern production of this long play. Nor are his additions and interpolations all that lavish, the only heavily affected scenes being II, 3, where Coriolanus solicits the plebeians’ votes, IV, 3 (the highway) and V, 4. Their extent and direction can be judged from the following scene-by-scene summary (Shakespeare’s scene numbers being given each time in parentheses):