The Life and Times of Bertolt Brecht

Running time: The performance lasts approximately 2 hours.

In Slovenian, without translation.

Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was a man of the theatre, a true homo theatralis, director, playwright, dramaturge, theorist, and theatre reformer. He was also a poet and writer. It is perhaps impossible to determine with complete certainty which of these was his foremost vocation. Fredric Jameson therefore suggests that we talk about the “Brecht complex” as a collection of heterogeneous, discontinuous and fragmented layers of history – after all, such a montage of contradictory fragments was also Brecht’s favourite theatrical and artistic format. At around the same time, Alain Badiou defends a similar position, namely that we should see Brecht as “an emblematic figure of the twentieth century.” Both authors, Jameson and Badiou, thus proceed from the observation that Brecht’s life correlates to the history of his own era. There is therefore no simple disjunction between Bertolt Brecht's life and times, no unbridgeable gap; on the contrary – the conjunction in the title of the performance suggests that an irreversible dialectical integration occurs between the two, that they must be understood in their mutual interaction, and that therefore we cannot speak of one without also saying something about the other.
The Life and Times of Bertolt Brecht is therefore not a classic biography, even though Brecht's life is full of interesting and unusual anecdotes, myths, legends, and all but incredible occurrences. Instead, it is an attempt to use Brecht and his life to say something about the historical context of his time, about fascism and exile, and about the dark times in which talking about trees, as Brecht wrote in his famous poem An die Nachgeborenen [To Those Born Later], meant remaining silent about so many wrongdoings. Moreover, the performance is perhaps an attempt at historicization, that characteristic Brechtian technique of alienation, which dictates that the action of a play be set in the past to draw parallels with contemporary events from a cognitive and temporal distance.

At the same time, the production seeks to deconstruct the myth of Brecht-as-genius, the great author and an exceptional individual. These are all ideological categories that Brecht rejected and that were first associated with him during his lifetime, but spread widely after his death. Brecht does not represent an individual author, but primarily collective authorship, thus enabling a new reflection on different types of collectivities in a hyper-individualised and atomised society. 
Art—and theatre in particular—is a collective work, with emphasis on both words. Brecht's theatre was created by a large community of collaborators, at the same time being a precisely organized, dedicated, and selfless endeavour. Bertolt Brecht thus primarily represents the workshop or Werkstatt, to which many of Brecht's contemporaries contributed, many only indirectly, through discussions and conversations they had with him, from which he later drew his inspiration, while others contributed quite directly. Seminal figures in this regard were Brecht's female collaborators, Helene Weigel, Ruth Berlau, Margarete Steffin, and Elisabeth Hauptmann, women whom the historical narrative of Brecht, at the intersection of bourgeois-patriarchal enthusiasm for the Individual (male), constantly relegated to the margins.

The Life and Times of Bertolt Brecht focuses primarily on Brecht's exile (1933–49). It was during this time, the period that witnessed fascism and World War II, that Brecht formulated his fundamental concepts of epic or dialectical theatre, including the concept of alienation or Verfremdung, and wrote his two seminal theoretical works, Buying Brass and A Short Organum for the Theatre, as well as his so-called "major plays," The Life of Galileo, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Mother Courage and Her Children. If the tradition of European theatre largely rests on the legacy of Brecht's theatre, then its origins in the experience of exile must be borne in mind, an experience likewise bearing a crucial political message for contemporaneity.