A Respectable Wedding
This early Brecht play critiques bourgeois society through a wedding and the people gathered around it.
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This early Brecht play critiques bourgeois society through a wedding and the people gathered around it.
In two non-linear parts, women associated with the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1905 perish while attempting to stop the violence of their times.
Brecht reframes Sophocles’ tragedy through a modern opening in which two sisters shelter their deserter brother before he is lynched, paralleling this death with Polynices’ fate. Creon is presented as a Nazi-style dictator.
A drunken, dissolute poet rejects bourgeois convention, wanders through the countryside and leaves sexual and violent destruction behind him. After seducing Johanna, abandoning Sophie and murdering Ekart, Baal dies alone while hunted by police.
Cerha adapts Bertolt Brecht’s play about Baal, an outsider who refuses to accept society’s expectations; this leads to violence, inner emigration and self-destruction.
Brecht’s unfinished adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy reworks the conflict through Brecht’s political thought, particularly Mao Zedong’s concept of primary and secondary contradictions.
Pig farmer Dansen relies on contracts and neutrality while a gangster called the Stranger kills or displaces neighboring shopkeepers and takes over their businesses. As the violence spreads, Dansen delays resistance, signs a pact for protection, and finally loses his pigs and storehouse to the Stranger. The action allegorizes European appeasement of Nazi expansion.
During a mountain journey, a boy accompanying his teacher and fellow students falls ill. The group follows a custom that requires him to agree to being abandoned; his companion text, Der Neinsager, gives an alternative in which he refuses and asks that custom be reconsidered.
During an expedition over a mountain pass, a boy falls ill and cannot continue. Against the custom that the group sacrifice him to preserve the mission, he refuses and asserts the individual’s right to reject a harmful rule.
Paul Dessau’s German-language opera with a libretto by Bertolt Brecht was revised after its first performance and reinstated under this title.
Brecht’s version follows the notorious womanizer Don Juan and his servant Sganarelle through much of Molière’s comic plot, recast with an anti-aristocratic emphasis.
A group of First World War soldiers desert and hide in Mülheim while waiting for a revolution. Their survival depends on the individualistic Johann Fatzer, whose impulses conflict with the discipline and solidarity represented by Keuner; the fragmented action ends with the group dead.
A self-confident, manipulative Bavarian peasant boy tries to outwit the watchful parents of a village girl.
After four years as a prisoner of war in Africa, Andreas Kragler returns to Berlin to find his former fiancée Anna engaged to war profiteer Friedrich Murk. Anna leaves Murk and searches for Andreas amid the Spartacist uprising; they reunite as the play exposes class conflict and the returning soldier's sense of betrayal.
A cycle of short plays depicts Nazi Germany through scenes of poverty, surveillance, antisemitism, coercion and fear. Families, workers, prisoners, judges and officials reveal how everyday relationships and institutions are distorted by the regime; the epic-theatre production makes that behavior and the cycle's anti-Nazi argument explicit.
In an allegorical shop drama, Svenson is repeatedly pressed by a gangster-like buyer to sell iron. As neighboring shopkeepers Austrian and Czech are attacked, Svenson refuses to join Herr Britt’s pact against the gangster, who represents Nazi Germany; Svenson ultimately becomes a victim himself.
In Chicago, book clerk George Garga and timber dealer Shlink engage in an inexplicable struggle that devastates Garga’s family. Their attempts to dominate and understand one another lead to betrayal, imprisonment and the ruin of those around them before Garga declares himself the victor and leaves.
Galileo uses a telescope to support the heliocentric model, but his discoveries conflict with Catholic doctrine. Under threat from the Inquisition he recants and lives under house arrest; he later gives Andrea a copy of his scientific work to smuggle out, while insisting his surrender was self-interested rather than heroic.
This Lehrstück presents the stages of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight as a lesson about the relation between individual achievement and collective effort. Its original radio version combined Brecht’s text with music by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith.
A sequence of eleven songs and interludes traces the rise and collapse of Mahagonny. People seek escape in the gold town, enjoy its pleasures, confront moments of despair, answer accusations about their lives, and watch the city crumble.
In colonial India, Irish civilian Galy Gay is forcibly transformed into an ideal soldier. Brecht's epic comedy treats personality as something that can be dismantled and reassembled, using military collective action to explore war, identity, and the replaceability of individuals.
During the Thirty Years' War, canteen woman Anna Fierling, called Mother Courage, follows armies to profit from the conflict while trying to protect her children. Over twelve years, she loses Eilif, Schweizerkas, and Kattrin to the war, yet keeps pulling her cart after Kattrin's death. The play follows how the business she depends on destroys her family.
The aristocratic landowner Puntila is warm and affectionate when drunk but cold and miserly when sober. His daughter Eva loves Matti, her father’s chauffeur, while Puntila tries to arrange her marriage to an attaché; Matti’s final resignation exposes the class barrier between them.
An opera by Paul Dessau based on Bertolt Brecht’s play Mr Puntila and His Man Matti.
Fugitives Begbick, Fatty, and Moses found Mahagonny, a pleasure city where “do what you want” becomes its law. Lumberjack Jimmy Mahoney arrives with friends, but after the hurricane misses the city, the residents embrace unrestrained consumption and violence. Jimmy is arrested for being unable to pay his bills and is sentenced to death; after his execution, factional conflict destroys the city.
In the fictitious country of Yahoo, rulers preserve power by setting round-headed people against pointed-headed people, redirecting class conflict into racial antagonism. The epic parable unfolds in eleven scenes with songs.
In 20th-century Chicago, idealistic Joan Dark of the Black Straw Hats mission tries to relieve hungry workers’ suffering. Meatpacking magnate Pierpont Mauler manipulates the stock market and the workers’ livelihoods; Joan confronts his cruelty, loses faith in her mission, and dies as a bitter martyr among capitalists, strike-breakers and the poor.
In Nazi-occupied Prague and on the Eastern Front, Schweyk is forced into the war but repeatedly survives the Gestapo, a military prison, and labor service. Lost in a snowstorm near Stalingrad, he encounters Hitler, whose path is blocked by snow, corpses, the Soviet army, and the German people; Hitler dances grotesquely and disappears into the snow.
During the Spanish Civil War, Teresa Carrar tries to keep her sons from joining the fighting, but the pressure of the conflict ultimately draws her to the side of the oppressed.
A wrecked flight crew confronts whether people help one another and whether the fallen can accept their non-existence. Through investigations, a council, examination and final consent, the work questions complicity with power and violence; its original multimedia performance combined music, choral passages, clown scenes and film.
In a postwar frame story, two communes dispute who should control abandoned farmland. A singer presents a parable about Grusha, a peasant girl who rescues and raises a governor’s abandoned child; a judge later uses a chalk-circle test to decide who should keep him.
Rather than follow an individual hero, the play presents the Paris Commune through a composite community, shifting among people in Montmartre and the city council as Thiers and Bismarck engineer its defeat.
Four agitators return from a mission to organize workers in China and ask a central committee to judge their killing of a young comrade. Their reenactment shows how the comrade’s undisciplined actions endangered the movement; he agrees to die rather than expose it, and the committee approves their decision.
A surrealist prose farce presented as a play within a play; Brecht later suggested it be performed as a foyer interlude and subtitled it “The provability of any and every contention.”
A rich merchant and a working-class porter cross the fictional Yahi Desert on an oil-deal journey. The merchant grows fearful and brutal, then mistakenly shoots the porter, who was offering him water; a court acquits the merchant, exposing the unequal logic of class power.
Brecht’s revised Lehrstück retells Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight while repudiating the aviator’s historical politics. The revision removes Lindbergh’s name and changes the first-person identification to an impersonal one.
After the gods reward the prostitute Shen Teh for sheltering them, she buys a tobacco shop, but her generosity draws people who exploit it. To protect herself she adopts the identity of her stern male cousin Shui Ta, whose business acumen turns the shop into a factory. As she falls in love with an unemployed pilot and becomes pregnant, the boundary between the two identities strains; the play leaves the audience to confront whether goodness can survive in an unjust society.
A Lehrstück retells the story of the Horatii and Curiaces; its two choruses are the main characters. The play was originally printed without a musical score.
After the United States threatens to bombard Shimoda in 1854, Japanese officials ask geisha Okichi to serve the American consul to protect the city. Celebrated as a patriot, Okichi later faces the collapse of her marriage, public abuse, and poverty. Brecht and Wuolijoki's adaptation frames her story through interludes in which international guests discuss its political meaning.
Brecht’s free-verse adaptation recounts Edward II’s troubled reign and death, the rise and fall of his favourite Gaveston and of Roger Mortimer, and the disordered fate of Queen Isabella, against the backdrop of England in 1307–1326.
Pelagea Vlassova, mother of a revolutionary, undertakes a difficult path toward political and personal liberation. She confronts illiteracy, illness, her son's death, and material hardship, and comes to understand that improving family life requires collective struggle.
In 1930s Chicago, mobster Arturo Ui seeks control of the cauliflower racket by eliminating competition and intimidating its leaders. Brecht's parable satirizes Hitler's rise and the establishment of Nazi power through parallels between the fictional gangsters and historical figures.
Two sisters, Anna I and Anna II, travel through seven American cities to earn money for their family’s new house. Each scene confronts Anna II with one of the deadly sins, while Anna I’s practical demands and Anna II’s artistic impulses reveal them as a divided personality.
Two sisters, Anna I and Anna II, travel from Louisiana through American cities to earn money for a family home. Anna I manages her emotional and artistic alter ego Anna II, who encounters one deadly sin in each city and is pressured to abandon moral impulses whenever they conflict with making money. They return home with the means to build the house, but Anna II accepts their compromise with resignation.
In Victorian London, gangster Macheath secretly marries Polly Peachum, angering her father, the city’s beggar boss. Macheath’s friend, police chief Tiger Brown, initially protects him, but Peachum pressures Brown by threatening to disrupt Queen Victoria’s coronation parade with beggars. Macheath is arrested and sentenced to hang; in a deliberately comic reversal, a royal messenger pardons him and grants him a title, castle, and pension.
Brecht’s epic, non-Aristotelian drama adapts a radio play into a stage treatment of Joan of Arc’s trial, with historical proceedings and a broad cast of judges, soldiers, townspeople and witnesses.
Paul Dessau’s first version of the opera, with a libretto by Bertolt Brecht, was presented under this title before being withdrawn and revised. The source identifies the work and its subsequent revision but supplies no plot summary.
Tutor Lauffer teaches the children of a retired major. After an affair with his student Gussie leaves her pregnant, he flees and later castrates himself to avoid repeating the scandal; he is then accepted as a model teacher and entrusted with Germany’s youth.
In occupied France in 1940, adolescent Simone works at a gas station as German forces approach. Inspired by a book about Joan of Arc, she imagines people around her in Joan’s story and sets fire to a hidden gasoline supply before the Germans can seize it.
Brecht recasts Farquhar’s Restoration comedy as an epic comedy: recruiting officer Plume arrives from London to find recruitment failing, while his friend Worthy seeks help in love and offers Plume a commission on boots.
At the imperial court, a vast cotton harvest coincides with soaring prices. A contest offers Princess Turandot’s hand to the intellectual who best explains the shortage, while the gangster Gogher Gogh seizes power and the peasant revolutionary Kai Ho’s forces gather outside the palace. The epic comedy satirizes the commoditization of intellect under capitalism.
This early Brecht play critiques bourgeois society through a wedding and the people gathered around it.
In two non-linear parts, women associated with the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1905 perish while attempting to stop the violence of their times.
Brecht reframes Sophocles’ tragedy through a modern opening in which two sisters shelter their deserter brother before he is lynched, paralleling this death with Polynices’ fate. Creon is presented as a Nazi-style dictator.
A drunken, dissolute poet rejects bourgeois convention, wanders through the countryside and leaves sexual and violent destruction behind him. After seducing Johanna, abandoning Sophie and murdering Ekart, Baal dies alone while hunted by police.
Cerha adapts Bertolt Brecht’s play about Baal, an outsider who refuses to accept society’s expectations; this leads to violence, inner emigration and self-destruction.
Brecht’s unfinished adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy reworks the conflict through Brecht’s political thought, particularly Mao Zedong’s concept of primary and secondary contradictions.
Pig farmer Dansen relies on contracts and neutrality while a gangster called the Stranger kills or displaces neighboring shopkeepers and takes over their businesses. As the violence spreads, Dansen delays resistance, signs a pact for protection, and finally loses his pigs and storehouse to the Stranger. The action allegorizes European appeasement of Nazi expansion.
During a mountain journey, a boy accompanying his teacher and fellow students falls ill. The group follows a custom that requires him to agree to being abandoned; his companion text, Der Neinsager, gives an alternative in which he refuses and asks that custom be reconsidered.
During an expedition over a mountain pass, a boy falls ill and cannot continue. Against the custom that the group sacrifice him to preserve the mission, he refuses and asserts the individual’s right to reject a harmful rule.
Paul Dessau’s German-language opera with a libretto by Bertolt Brecht was revised after its first performance and reinstated under this title.
Brecht’s version follows the notorious womanizer Don Juan and his servant Sganarelle through much of Molière’s comic plot, recast with an anti-aristocratic emphasis.
A group of First World War soldiers desert and hide in Mülheim while waiting for a revolution. Their survival depends on the individualistic Johann Fatzer, whose impulses conflict with the discipline and solidarity represented by Keuner; the fragmented action ends with the group dead.
A self-confident, manipulative Bavarian peasant boy tries to outwit the watchful parents of a village girl.
After four years as a prisoner of war in Africa, Andreas Kragler returns to Berlin to find his former fiancée Anna engaged to war profiteer Friedrich Murk. Anna leaves Murk and searches for Andreas amid the Spartacist uprising; they reunite as the play exposes class conflict and the returning soldier's sense of betrayal.
A cycle of short plays depicts Nazi Germany through scenes of poverty, surveillance, antisemitism, coercion and fear. Families, workers, prisoners, judges and officials reveal how everyday relationships and institutions are distorted by the regime; the epic-theatre production makes that behavior and the cycle's anti-Nazi argument explicit.
In an allegorical shop drama, Svenson is repeatedly pressed by a gangster-like buyer to sell iron. As neighboring shopkeepers Austrian and Czech are attacked, Svenson refuses to join Herr Britt’s pact against the gangster, who represents Nazi Germany; Svenson ultimately becomes a victim himself.
In Chicago, book clerk George Garga and timber dealer Shlink engage in an inexplicable struggle that devastates Garga’s family. Their attempts to dominate and understand one another lead to betrayal, imprisonment and the ruin of those around them before Garga declares himself the victor and leaves.
Galileo uses a telescope to support the heliocentric model, but his discoveries conflict with Catholic doctrine. Under threat from the Inquisition he recants and lives under house arrest; he later gives Andrea a copy of his scientific work to smuggle out, while insisting his surrender was self-interested rather than heroic.
This Lehrstück presents the stages of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight as a lesson about the relation between individual achievement and collective effort. Its original radio version combined Brecht’s text with music by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith.
A sequence of eleven songs and interludes traces the rise and collapse of Mahagonny. People seek escape in the gold town, enjoy its pleasures, confront moments of despair, answer accusations about their lives, and watch the city crumble.
In colonial India, Irish civilian Galy Gay is forcibly transformed into an ideal soldier. Brecht's epic comedy treats personality as something that can be dismantled and reassembled, using military collective action to explore war, identity, and the replaceability of individuals.
During the Thirty Years' War, canteen woman Anna Fierling, called Mother Courage, follows armies to profit from the conflict while trying to protect her children. Over twelve years, she loses Eilif, Schweizerkas, and Kattrin to the war, yet keeps pulling her cart after Kattrin's death. The play follows how the business she depends on destroys her family.
The aristocratic landowner Puntila is warm and affectionate when drunk but cold and miserly when sober. His daughter Eva loves Matti, her father’s chauffeur, while Puntila tries to arrange her marriage to an attaché; Matti’s final resignation exposes the class barrier between them.
An opera by Paul Dessau based on Bertolt Brecht’s play Mr Puntila and His Man Matti.
Fugitives Begbick, Fatty, and Moses found Mahagonny, a pleasure city where “do what you want” becomes its law. Lumberjack Jimmy Mahoney arrives with friends, but after the hurricane misses the city, the residents embrace unrestrained consumption and violence. Jimmy is arrested for being unable to pay his bills and is sentenced to death; after his execution, factional conflict destroys the city.
In the fictitious country of Yahoo, rulers preserve power by setting round-headed people against pointed-headed people, redirecting class conflict into racial antagonism. The epic parable unfolds in eleven scenes with songs.
In 20th-century Chicago, idealistic Joan Dark of the Black Straw Hats mission tries to relieve hungry workers’ suffering. Meatpacking magnate Pierpont Mauler manipulates the stock market and the workers’ livelihoods; Joan confronts his cruelty, loses faith in her mission, and dies as a bitter martyr among capitalists, strike-breakers and the poor.
In Nazi-occupied Prague and on the Eastern Front, Schweyk is forced into the war but repeatedly survives the Gestapo, a military prison, and labor service. Lost in a snowstorm near Stalingrad, he encounters Hitler, whose path is blocked by snow, corpses, the Soviet army, and the German people; Hitler dances grotesquely and disappears into the snow.
During the Spanish Civil War, Teresa Carrar tries to keep her sons from joining the fighting, but the pressure of the conflict ultimately draws her to the side of the oppressed.
A wrecked flight crew confronts whether people help one another and whether the fallen can accept their non-existence. Through investigations, a council, examination and final consent, the work questions complicity with power and violence; its original multimedia performance combined music, choral passages, clown scenes and film.
In a postwar frame story, two communes dispute who should control abandoned farmland. A singer presents a parable about Grusha, a peasant girl who rescues and raises a governor’s abandoned child; a judge later uses a chalk-circle test to decide who should keep him.
Rather than follow an individual hero, the play presents the Paris Commune through a composite community, shifting among people in Montmartre and the city council as Thiers and Bismarck engineer its defeat.
Four agitators return from a mission to organize workers in China and ask a central committee to judge their killing of a young comrade. Their reenactment shows how the comrade’s undisciplined actions endangered the movement; he agrees to die rather than expose it, and the committee approves their decision.
A surrealist prose farce presented as a play within a play; Brecht later suggested it be performed as a foyer interlude and subtitled it “The provability of any and every contention.”
A rich merchant and a working-class porter cross the fictional Yahi Desert on an oil-deal journey. The merchant grows fearful and brutal, then mistakenly shoots the porter, who was offering him water; a court acquits the merchant, exposing the unequal logic of class power.
Brecht’s revised Lehrstück retells Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight while repudiating the aviator’s historical politics. The revision removes Lindbergh’s name and changes the first-person identification to an impersonal one.
After the gods reward the prostitute Shen Teh for sheltering them, she buys a tobacco shop, but her generosity draws people who exploit it. To protect herself she adopts the identity of her stern male cousin Shui Ta, whose business acumen turns the shop into a factory. As she falls in love with an unemployed pilot and becomes pregnant, the boundary between the two identities strains; the play leaves the audience to confront whether goodness can survive in an unjust society.
A Lehrstück retells the story of the Horatii and Curiaces; its two choruses are the main characters. The play was originally printed without a musical score.
After the United States threatens to bombard Shimoda in 1854, Japanese officials ask geisha Okichi to serve the American consul to protect the city. Celebrated as a patriot, Okichi later faces the collapse of her marriage, public abuse, and poverty. Brecht and Wuolijoki's adaptation frames her story through interludes in which international guests discuss its political meaning.
Brecht’s free-verse adaptation recounts Edward II’s troubled reign and death, the rise and fall of his favourite Gaveston and of Roger Mortimer, and the disordered fate of Queen Isabella, against the backdrop of England in 1307–1326.
Pelagea Vlassova, mother of a revolutionary, undertakes a difficult path toward political and personal liberation. She confronts illiteracy, illness, her son's death, and material hardship, and comes to understand that improving family life requires collective struggle.
In 1930s Chicago, mobster Arturo Ui seeks control of the cauliflower racket by eliminating competition and intimidating its leaders. Brecht's parable satirizes Hitler's rise and the establishment of Nazi power through parallels between the fictional gangsters and historical figures.
Two sisters, Anna I and Anna II, travel through seven American cities to earn money for their family’s new house. Each scene confronts Anna II with one of the deadly sins, while Anna I’s practical demands and Anna II’s artistic impulses reveal them as a divided personality.
Two sisters, Anna I and Anna II, travel from Louisiana through American cities to earn money for a family home. Anna I manages her emotional and artistic alter ego Anna II, who encounters one deadly sin in each city and is pressured to abandon moral impulses whenever they conflict with making money. They return home with the means to build the house, but Anna II accepts their compromise with resignation.
In Victorian London, gangster Macheath secretly marries Polly Peachum, angering her father, the city’s beggar boss. Macheath’s friend, police chief Tiger Brown, initially protects him, but Peachum pressures Brown by threatening to disrupt Queen Victoria’s coronation parade with beggars. Macheath is arrested and sentenced to hang; in a deliberately comic reversal, a royal messenger pardons him and grants him a title, castle, and pension.
Brecht’s epic, non-Aristotelian drama adapts a radio play into a stage treatment of Joan of Arc’s trial, with historical proceedings and a broad cast of judges, soldiers, townspeople and witnesses.
Paul Dessau’s first version of the opera, with a libretto by Bertolt Brecht, was presented under this title before being withdrawn and revised. The source identifies the work and its subsequent revision but supplies no plot summary.
Tutor Lauffer teaches the children of a retired major. After an affair with his student Gussie leaves her pregnant, he flees and later castrates himself to avoid repeating the scandal; he is then accepted as a model teacher and entrusted with Germany’s youth.
In occupied France in 1940, adolescent Simone works at a gas station as German forces approach. Inspired by a book about Joan of Arc, she imagines people around her in Joan’s story and sets fire to a hidden gasoline supply before the Germans can seize it.
Brecht recasts Farquhar’s Restoration comedy as an epic comedy: recruiting officer Plume arrives from London to find recruitment failing, while his friend Worthy seeks help in love and offers Plume a commission on boots.
At the imperial court, a vast cotton harvest coincides with soaring prices. A contest offers Princess Turandot’s hand to the intellectual who best explains the shortage, while the gangster Gogher Gogh seizes power and the peasant revolutionary Kai Ho’s forces gather outside the palace. The epic comedy satirizes the commoditization of intellect under capitalism.