Word: brecht
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...play, Grass's first, depicts a caricatured Bertolt Brecht -- The Boss -- rehearsing an adaptation of Coriolanus in East Berlin, June, 1953. Brecht, and here Plebeians tells no lies, has transfigured Shakespeare's tragedy into a didactic tract for revolution. Shakespeare's silly tribunes of the people become radical ideologues; Coriolanus -- the "colossal" as he is described in Plebeians -- is reduced to a despot with a certain knack for winning battles. And quite as much as Brecht tampered with Shakespeare, Grass has tampered with Brecht. He has made him a patronizing, cynical esthete resigned to the failure of revolution...
...Brecht's vision of the theater as a classroom works ideally in Galileo. To the audience, the great astronomer plays teacher, a kind of intellectual locksmith picking at the rusty encrustations of habit, custom and tradition as he elucidates his proofs that the earth revolves around the sun. This Galileo is a glutton of food, wine and ideas. As one character says, he has "thinking bouts." As Brecht sees it, this very appetite is Galileo's fatal flaw. His desire to save his skin ranks above any devotion to a pure priesthood of science, any will to suffer...
...betraying his faith in doubt, Brecht argues, Galileo also betrayed a new age of reason in which scientists would control their own discoveries for the good of common humanity. This is rather naive because it assumes that people alter power rather than that power alters people. It leads Brecht into his customary fallacy of assuming that power is good in the hands of workers and scientists and bad in the hands of statesmen, clerics and generals. As a historical determinist, Brecht curiously calls for a needless martyrdom. With or without Galileo's recantation, an age of science was inevitable...
Puntila and His Hired Man, unlike Galileo, resembles a journey without a destination. In Brecht, dramatic conflict does not resolve itself in tragedy as a death struggle between good and evil, but in irony as a life struggle between irreconcilable divisions in the human psyche itself...
Puntila is a wealthy Finnish landowner and a totally different man when drunk than when sober. When drunk, he is generous, kindly, amorous, democratic and the soul of good fellowship. When sober, he is mean, arrogant, priggish and smoldering with hatred for his fellow man. Puntila sober, as Brecht sees it, is a class-conditioned animal. Puntila drunk is Rousseau's child of instinctive natural goodness. Some richly comic scenes pivot on this personality split. Puntila sober wouldn't dream of fraternizing with his chauffeur Matti; Puntila drunk begs Matti to marry his daughter. Puntila drunk gets engaged...