Brecht Collected Plays: 6: Good Person of Szechwan; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui; Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  4. Puntila’s drunkenness

  The actor playing Puntila will find that his chief problem is how to portray the drunkenness which makes up 90 per cent of the part. It would seem unacceptably repellent were he to contribute the conventional drunk act, in other words to demonstrate a state of intoxication blurring over and devaluing every physical and mental process. The drunkenness played by Steckel was the drunkenness specific to Puntila, i.e. that through which the landowner achieves his semblance of humanity. Far from exhibiting the usual impairments of speech and physical movement, he displayed a rhythmical, almost musical way of speaking and relaxed, almost ballet-like movements. Admittedly a certain handicap was imposed on his inspiration by the weight of his limbs, which was too great for those superterrestrial motions which he had in mind. He ascended Mount Hatelma on wings, albeit slightly defective ones. Each of the monster’s drunken gests – of meekness, anger at injustice, generosity in giving and taking, comradeship, and what not – was developed with gusto. Puntila abandoned his possessions like a Buddha, disowned his daughter as in the Bible, invited the Kurgela women to be his guests like some Homeric monarch.

  5 Steckel’s two Puntilas

  Before playing Puntila in Berlin Steckel had played him in Zurich. There he played almost without makeup, and the impression gained by most of the audience was of a likeable man subject to the occasional nasty turn when in a state of sobriety, which state being tantamount to a hangover the turns seemed excusable. In Berlin, in view of these effects, he opted for a foully shaped bald head and made himself up with debauched and debased features. Only now did his drunken charm seem menacing and his sociable approaches like those of a crocodile. Nearly all German performances of this play, whether before or after the Berlin production, suffered from the same mistake as was made in Zurich.

  6. Socially based humour

  There is little that a play like Puntila can take from the rag-bag of ‘timeless humour.’ True, even in ‘timeless humour’ there is a social element – the clown sets out brimming with self-confidence and falls flat on his face – but it has become overlaid to the point where the clown’s fall appears like something purely biological, something that is humorous to all people under all conditions. The actors who perform Mr Puntila and his Man Matti must derive their humour from the prevailing class situation, even if that means there are one or two classes whose members will not laugh. When the happily reintoxicated landowner gets Matti to build him a Mount Hatelma from the billiard-room furniture, Matti does so with anger, because even in the depths of drunkenness Puntila did not omit to sack Red Surkkala. Relentlessly he demolishes gun cabinet and grandfather clock; this is going to be an expensive mountain. At each crash Puntila winces and his smile becomes forced. – In the village Puntila listens to the life stories of the Kurgela girls, but he does not listen properly because he knows what is coming and takes a long pull of ‘legal alcohol’ after every story. The humour is of a gloomy sort. – If the landowner takes the women’s ‘Plum’ song as a personal tribute that is traditional humour and unexceptionable. But there is added depth if he appears somehow interested in folklore and adopts a knowledgeable expression. It shows up the cleft which is the theme of the play. – In scene 4 Puntila brings a group of agricultural workers back from the hiring fair. It is the one day in the year when they are able to find jobs, and Puntila has no use for them; he just wants company. He at once raises one man’s hopes (‘I like the look in his eye’). Then he breaks through the ring of workers surrounding him and hastens into the sauna in order to sober up enough to get the strength to throw the workers out. The cravenness of this flight into sobriety is a stroke of humour that can scarcely be achieved except by an actor with social understanding and socialist principles.

  7. The women of Kurgela

  From the outset the portrayal of those women of Kurgela whom Puntila invites to his estate when drunk and throws out when sober presented great problems. These are the noblest characters in the play, and in planning their costumes and makeup we hestitated a long time between the beautiful and the characteristic before realising that these are not really opposites. To give a fairy-tale quality to the story of the four early risers we started by making stylised costumes with very delicate colours, then thought them boring and plumped for naturalism without regard for beauty. This led to outsize boots and long noses. Then Caspar Neher intervened. Full of scepticism, he came to the rehearsals and produced a batch of scene designs that are among the most beautiful things which our generation has created for the theatre. He solved the problem of how to reconcile the women’s naive behaviour with their practical worldly wisdom by having them play a light-hearted game with the landowner. With jokes and a bit of play-acting they confronted the landowner as a body, as the legendary ‘Women of Kurgela’, biblical brides hoping for a dance and a coffee from their bridegroom on high. Neher made them don straw garlands, and he endowed the chauffeur Matti too with imagination, devising the broom which he sticks in the ground and addresses as the High Court at Viborg, and also uses to sweep up the garlands when they have thrown them down in the yard following their unpleasant reception. Now that their behaviour had been got right there was virtually no problem in making the costumes and makeup beautiful. The cut of the costumes remained realistic, but their contours were somewhat stressed and identical material was used for all of them. The faces were given a certain uncouth, peasant quality – we began by testing the effect of crumbled cement which we tried out on plaster casts – while a golden complexion was created by covering them with warm-toned pounded ochre. The big shoes, retained for one of the women, in no way detracted from the beauty which came above all from the dignity of these working women. Starting as poor guests, they became rich in kindliness, ready and willing to bestow their humour even on a landowner; from poetic figures they turned into real people with a feeling for poetry. Composed by a great painter, the groupings lent grace and power to their natural, realistic demeanour.

  8. Caspar Neher’s Puntila stage

  The symbolist stage of Expressionists and Existentialists, which expresses general ideas, is of no use to a realistic theatre, nor can we go back to the naturalistic stage with its crude mixture of the relevant and the irrelevant. A mere echo of the real world is not enough; it must be not only recognisable but also understandable. This means that the images have to be artistically valid and to display an individual handwriting. Wit and imagination are specially desirable in the designer of a comedy.

  9. The masks

  Puntila, the Attache, the parson, parson’s wife, lawyer, and judge all wore more or less grotesque masks and moved in a foolish, regal manner. Matti, the women of Kurgela, the hired hands, and the agricultural workers wore no masks and moved normally. An exception was made for Eva, the landowner’s daughter; she had no mask. Any suggestion that this amounts to symbolism would be unfounded. No hidden significance is intended. The theatre is simply adopting an attitude and heightening significant aspects of reality, to wit, certain physiognomical malformations to be found in parasites.

  10. Is a play like Mr Puntila and his Man Matti still relevant to us now that the big estates have been got rid of?

  There is an attractive kind of impatience which would have the theatre only present things in their current real-life state. Why waste time on an estate owner? Haven’t we got rid of such people? Why show a proletarian like Matti? Don’t we have more active fighters? Likeable as such impatience is, it should not be given way to. The fact that alongside those works of art which we have to organise there are certain works of art that have come down to us is only a valid argument if the usefulness of the latter can be proved, never mind how much time is needed to organise the former. Why can Mr Puntila and his Man Matti still be regarded as a play with relevance? Because not only the struggle but the history of that struggle is instructive. Because past eras leave a deposit in people’s souls for a long time. Because the class struggle demands that victory in one area of conflict be ex
ploited so as to promote victory in another, and in both cases the situation prior to victory may be similar. Because, like all pioneers, people who have been liberated from their oppressors may at first have a hard life, since they have to replace the oppressors’ system with a new one. These are the sorts of arguments that can be adduced to show the relevance of plays like Mr Puntila and his Man Matti.

  [1. 4 and 10 from GW SzT 1173–5, the rest from pp. 18–45 of Theaterarbeit (1950), for which these notes were written. They refer to the Berliner Ensemble production of 1949, in which Puntila was played initially by Steckel once more, and later by the comedian Curt Bois. Paul Dessau’s setting of the songs was written for this. The last note is an answer to some of Brecht’s East German critics.]

  NOTES ON THE PUNTILA FILM

  1 About the script for Puntila

  As it stands the script doesn’t seem right to me. It is true that it follows the general line which Pozner and I agreed on, but in the course of its realisation the story has lapsed into a genre which makes it not so much comic as ridiculous. It has become a drawing-room comedy in which the crude jokes of the play jar and seem merely crude. Nor is it clear who is telling the entire story or from what point of view. The film company, it would seem, and from the point of view of making a film. The Puntila tales have of course to be told from below, from the position of the people. Then characters like Matti and Eva Puntila can be seen in the right light. The present script turns Matti into a feeble, indefinite figure; it fails to bring out how despite and because of their master/man relationship he is in continual opposition to his employer in every line he says. What makes Eva Puntila ‘love’ him is not his muscles – it would be all the same if he had none – but the fact that he is a proper man, humorous, dominating and so forth. Nor of course must he for one instant imagine that Eva is the right wife for him or that Mr Puntila would really let him have her. His test is simply a way of deflating Eva and Puntila’s romantic notion. It has to remain a game if Matti is not to be made into an idiot.

  We have made a new outline, since I realise that the studio cannot wait. As the poetic material is already at hand the preparation of a new shooting script would be a remarkably quick business. Given the script as it is I would find it quite impossible to turn the new dialogue (which makes up at least half the total dialogue and is entirely naturalistic) into Puntila-German, because the situations are naturalistic and in my view false. Nor if this script were used could I under any circumstances allow the use of my name or the name Puntila. I am not by any means out to make difficulties, but neither do I wish to damage my reputation as a writer. I am sure you will understand this.

  2 New story line for Puntila

  1. Hotel Tavasthus

  Surrounded by passed-out drunks and dead-tired waiters, a man is traversing a vast table covered with plates of meat and bottles: it is Mr Puntila. He claims to be able to walk dry-shod across the sea of aquavit represented to him by the table top. Another man addresses him, and turns out to be his chauffeur whom he has left waiting outside for two days and a night. Feeling lonely and abandoned by his too easily intoxicated friends – the judge, the teacher, and so on – Puntila instantly becomes bosom pals with his chauffeur Matti and discusses with him his most intimate concerns, i.e. his daughter Eva’s forthcoming engagement to an attache. For this a dowry is required, so he must sell a forest. To postpone the decision Puntila has got drunk. They decide to have another look at the forest.

  2. Forest

  Puntila realises that the forest is too beautiful to sell. Sooner than that he will marry Widow Klinckmann, who is rich and the owner of the Kurgela estate, but whom he last saw fifty years ago. Off to Kurgela.

  3. Kurgela

  Rousing the sleepy domestics Puntila pushes his way through them into Widow Klinckmann’s bedroom. One look is enough: the widow is too hideous to sell himself to.

  4. The Village of Kurgela Next Day

  Fleeing from Widow Klinckmann and avid for beauty, Puntila meets three young women, is upset by the sadness of their lives and instantly becomes engaged to them. He tells them to come to Puntila Hall on the following Sunday. The young women take this as a jest on the part of a well-to-do drunk gentleman, and laughingly promise they will come. The telephone operator, last of the three, advises him to drive to the hiring fair at Lammi, where he will meet another estate owner called Bibelius who wants to buy his forest. He will recognise him by his butterfly tie-pin. Since the forest has to be sold after all, Puntila decides to drive to Lammi.

  5. Hiring Fair

  The alcoholic effects are wearing off. Puntila gives vent to some intelligent and ill-natured remarks about servants. Drinks coffee laced with rum, and apologises to Matti. Discloses his malady and asks Matti for moral support. Engages four cripples because he likes them as people. Sees a fat man beating a horse and tells him where to get off. On Matti and the workers expressing their enthusiastic approval he learns that he has just beaten up the man who wants to buy his forest. This sobers him up, and he gets gloomily into his car without offering a lift to the labourers.

  ‘Home,’ he says curtly. ‘I’m selling the forest to Widow Klinckmann.’

  6. Puntila Hall

  Preparations for the engagement party are in full swing. Pigs are being slaughtered, windows cleaned, and Matti is helping the cook to nail up a garlanded sign which says ‘Welcome to the Engagement Party.’ Miss Puntila would like to know what Matti thinks of her engagement to the Attache. She herself has no use for him. With considerable ingenuity she induces Matti to help her stage a scandal in order to frighten off the Attache, who is now staying at Puntila Hall. The scandal is staged (sauna) but clearly the Attache must have enormous debts: he overlooks it. Puntila is very angry, takes his wallet from Matti, and threatens to tell the police. Eva blames Matti for not sticking up for himself like a gentleman.

  7. Summer Nights in Tavastland

  The combination of the feigned love scene with Matti and the erotic ambience of the summer night has put fresh thoughts into Eva’s head. On the pretext of catching crayfish she takes Matti rowing to a somewhat notorious island. Once there however the thought that she is behaving like a milkmaid disconcerts her; she insists on catching crayfish and is eventually rowed back by a frustrated Matti.

  8. Puntila Hall

  Puntila turns his three ‘fiancées’ off the estate, then tells Matti to collect the entire stock of liquor so that it can be destroyed. Thousands of bottles are collected in an operation involving the entire staff. Puntila drinks extravagantly and sends Matti off to bring back his ‘fiancées’. Beaming, he announces that in his view they are much better suited than certain other people to the sort of engagement party he has in mind.

  9. Country Road

  Matti drives off after the young women, but fails to persuade them to return.

  10. Inside Puntila Hall

  All the guests have arrived, including the foreign minister. Eva has locked herself in her room, so that the Attache has to receive them on his own. Enter like a whirlwind a totally drunk Puntila, who throws the Attache out. Thereafter he throws out the minister, parson, judge, and so on, and sends for the domestics. Matti on his return is offered Eva as his wife. Matti insists on testing Eva’s matrimonial capacities. She shows herself incompetent to do her own housework. Eventually when Matti slaps her on the backside she takes it badly and runs off in tears. Left alone, Puntila hears his hired hands singing the Ballad of the Forester and the Countess. He resolves to show Matti what a beautiful country they live in, and with this object they climb Mount Hatelma.

  11. In the Yard

  Matti turns his back on Puntila.

  [Brecht: Texte für Filme II, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1969, pp. 636–40. The Puntila film, under the same title as the play, was made in Austria by Wien-Film with Alberto Cavalcanti as director and Curt Bois in the title part (which he had also played in the second Berliner Ensemble production), and was first shown in Brussels on March 29, 1955. Vladimir Poz
ner was one of the scriptwriters. A new musical score was written by Hanns Eisler, and the text of the Puntila Song somewhat varied for the purpose.]

  Editorial Note

  1. PRELIMINARY IDEAS

  Though the Puntila theme was not Brecht’s own it none the less struck several familiar chords in his mind, among them being Faustian Man (with his twin souls), Chaplin’s film City Lights, and the ironic discursive style of Hasek’s Schweik. They may well moreover (as Jost Hermand has suggested) have included Carl Zuckmayer’s bucolic ‘People’s Play’ of 1925, Der frohliche Weinberg (The Cheerful Vineyard), and the falsely jovial personality of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring. There is, however, no sign of such elements coming together before Brecht met Hella Wuolijoki in 1940. Stimulated, so it appears, by the Finnish Dramatists’ League’s play competition, she then showed him her play The Sawdust Princess together with the film treatment from which it derived, with the result that by August 27 they had agreed to collaborate on a new version. For her the theme went back to the early 1930s when (according to evidence gathered by Hans-Peter Neureuter in the Mitteilungen aus der deutschen Bibliothek, Helsinki, numbers 7, 1973 and 8, 1974), she wrote the story based on the personality of one of her own relatives, which she called ‘A Finnish Bacchus’. This was worked up into a treatment for Suomi-Film, which however was never made. Its central character, says Margaret Mare in her edition of the play (Methuen, 1962), was to be

  Puntila, a Tavastland estate owner, who, mellowed by drink, went one night to the village and engaged himself to several young women with the help of liquor and curtain rings. Puntila has a daughter, Eva … who is wooed both by a young diplomat and by a chauffeur. She chooses the latter, and all ends well when he turns out to be an engineer, masquerading in his own chauffeur’s uniform.