The Good Soldier Švejk

It was a little over 100 years ago that the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek died, leaving his satirical novel The Good Soldier Švejk unfinished, and providing theatre artists with the raw material for some of the most influential stage adaptations of the 20th century.

Director Erwin Piscator famously brought the novel to the stage as a piece of epic theatre in the 1920s, collaborating on the script with Max Brod, Hans Reimann, Erwin Piscator, Felix Gasbarra, and Bertolt Brecht. Švejk later became the inspiration for the 1936 musical Johnny Johnson by Kurt Weill and Paul Green.

The story follows Josef Švejk, a muddle-headed man who volunteers to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the breakout of the First World War. Authorities aren't sure if he belongs in the army or a mental institution. Eventually, however, he is shipped off to the front, but after he misses his train, he decides to walk there... only in the wrong direction.

Last night, I saw a puppet adaptation of the novel performed by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre. In this adaptation by Vít Horejš, different performers take on the role of Švejk in turn, as the Švejk puppet is passed from one person to another. While this might keep audience members from identifying with the protagonist, it also prevents them from getting bored with any one actor, as Švejk's voice changes periodically throughout the performance.

If you want to see the production, it's running until February 18th at Theater for the New City.

Johnny Johnson

Recently I was at Westsider Books, hoping to pick up some--you know--books, when I got distracted by the vinyl records they had, including a cast recording to the Broadway revival of Kurt Weill and Paul Green's Johnny Johnson.

The recording is from the 1956 revival, but Johnny Johnson originally premiered on Broadway in 1936, billed as a "play with songs" rather than a musical. It was based loosely on Jaroslav Hašek's novel The Good Soldier Schweik, which had already been turned into a piece of Epic Theatre by Erwin Piscator.

For the Broadway production, Green and Weill made the protagonist an American soldier during the First World War, and reportedly chose the name "Johnny Johnson" because that name appeared on American casualty lists more than any other. Johnny begins the play having sculpted a peace monument that is no sooner dedicated than the announcement comes that the United States has entered the war. Johnny becomes a soldier, and misadventures ensue, leading him to eventually be sent to a mental hospital.

For the score, Weill noticeably recycled a melody he had previously used in Happy End. Overall, the music is recognizably his, even when he isn't rehashing earlier material. A typical number is "Song of the Guns" in which the chorus chants: "Soldiers! Soldiers! / Sleep softly now beneath the sky / Soldiers! Soldiers! / Tomorrow under earth you lie."

Johnny Johnson is not as well known as Weill's earlier work he wrote in Germany, such as The Threepenny Opera, nor was it as successful as his later work for Broadway, such as Knickerbocker Holiday. Still, it's worth a listen.

Epic Theatre

Many of the revolts against Realism have been elitist in nature. They were preformed in small theatres for a select group of artists and thinkers. In the 1920s, however, the director Erwin Piscator tried to create a non-realistic theatre style for the masses known as Epic Theatre. In Epic Theatre, the audience is always aware that they are watching a play, rather than losing themselves completely in the action. This new style avoided escapism, instead trying to move the audience to action, usually political action.

A devoted leftist, Piscator frequently adapted and staged progressive works not originally intended for the theatre. In 1928 he directed an adaptation of the anti-war novel The Good Soldier Schweik. The production utilized film clips, cartoons, and other elements of mass culture to comment upon the action of the play. Though Piscator took the lead in adapting The Good Soldier Schweik for the stage, he used a collaborative approach, in which many people participated in a collective that shaped the production. One member of that collective was Bertolt Brecht, who would go on to make Piscator's style of Epic Theatre famous.

Brecht began as an Expressionist poet and playwright, gaining the attention of Germany with his three early plays Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle of Cities. He later teamed up with the composer Kurt Weill and fellow writer Elizabeth Hauptman on the musical plays The Three-Penny Opera, Happy End, and The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny. Due to his leftist leanings, Brecht went into exile in Sweden in 1933. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Brecht had to flee again, first to Finland and then to the United States, before returning to Germany after the war. It was while abroad that Brecht wrote his major plays, The Private Life of the Master Race, Mother Courage and Her Children, Galileo, The Good Woman of Setzuan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

These plays relied upon what Brecht called the Alienation Effect. This was an idea he borrowed from the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky, who believed that the aim of all literature should be defamiliarization, making people see the ordinary in new ways. Brecht wanted audiences to think about his plays, not just to feel them emotionally. To do this, he would create scenes of intense emotion, but then force the audience to look critically at the characters provoking these emotions. For instance, in Mother Courage and Her Children, Brecht has a heart-rending scene depicting the death of a mute girl, then he shows the selfish attitude of her war-profiteering mother, leading the audience to question many of the assumptions they have made about the characters and about the world in which they live.

In 1949, Brecht returned to Berlin and set up a theatre company in Communist East Germany known as the Berliner Ensemble. He directed many of his own plays and the company toured the world, introducing new audiences to the Epic Theatre aesthetic. Productions often featured Brecht's wife, the actress Helene Weigel, who took over the Berliner Ensemble after her husband's death in 1956. Of all the theatre artists who revolted against Realism in the early twentieth century, Brecht has had the clearest impact, both on playwrights and directors. Dario Fo, Augusto Boal, Tony Kushner, and Caryl Churchill are just a few of the many theatre practitioners that have been influenced by the Epic Theatre popularized by Brecht.