Brecht Collected Plays: 6: Six

by Bertolt Brecht (Author), Bertolt Brecht (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1994

  $28.94

  Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.This sixth volume of Brecht's Collected Plays contains three plays he wrote while in exile during the early stages of the Second World War. In Brecht's famous parable The Good Person of Szechwan, the gods come to earth in search of a thoroughly good person. No one can be found until they meet Shen Te, a prostitute with a heart of gold. Rewarded by the gods, she gives up her profession and buys a tabacco shop but finds it is impossible to survive as a good person in a corrupt world without the support of her ruthless alter ego Shui Ta.The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a savage satire on the rise of Hitler, wittily transposed to gangland Chicago. Brecht's compelling parable continues to have relevance wherever totalitarianism appears today. Written in 1940 during Brecht's exile in Finland, Puntila is one of his greatest creations, to be ranked alongside Galileo and Mother Courage. A hard-drinking Finnish landowner, Puntila suffers from a divided personality: when drunk he is human and humane; when sober, surly and self-centred. The play contains some of the best comedy Brecht wrote for the theatre. The translations are ideal for both study and performance. The volume is accompanied by a full introduction and notes by the series editor John Willett and includes Brecht's own notes and relevant texts as well as all the important textual variants.

• New

  Paperback
  1997

  $30.01

  The most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language Volume Three of Brecht's Collected Plays includes St Joan of the Stockyards - a play which recasts St Joan as Joan Dark springing hope into the hearts of factory workers at the mercy of meatpacker king Pierpont Mauler threatening cuts in the Depression; and the Lehrstucke or short 'didactic' pieces written during the years 1929 to 1933, are some of his most experimental work. Lindbergh's Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said Yes / He Said No, The Decision,The Exception and the Rule, and The Horatians and the Curiatians reject conventional theatre; they are spare and highly formalised, drawing on traditional Japanese and Chinese forms. They show Brecht in collaboration with the composers Hindemith, Weill and Eisler, influenced by the new techniques of montage in the visual arts and seeking new means of expression. Also included is The Mother, based on Gorky's novel about the progress of a factory strike in Tver and the journey of a peasant mother from illiteracy to card-carrying communism.The translators include H R Hays (The Horatians and the Curiatians), Ralph Manheim (St Joan of the Stockyards), Tom Osborn (The Exception and the Rule), Geoffrey Skelton (The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent), John Willett (Lindbergh's Flight;The Decision;The Mother) and Arthur Waley (He Said Yes / He Said No). The translations are ideal for both study and performance. The volume is accompanied by a full introduction and notes by the series editor John Willett and includes Brecht's own notes and relevant texts as well as all the important textual variants.