Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) Read Free Page B

choreography. Rehearsals were scheduled to start at the end of May 1947, when Laughton would havefinished 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 to5 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