Word: brechtian
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...that is my only quibble with Mr. Hancock. His direction was otherwise an inspired and faithful interpretation of Brechtian techniques, for which the Loeb is well suited. Titles are flashed on a curtain covering the lower half of the stage; an enormous revolve turns as Grusha and the soldiers march; music comes from offstage to accompany the songs; and scenery is moved in a public and unabashed way. The tension between the formality of the staging and the tenderness of the story makes for Brecht's tough beauty, and Hancock understood and used it with joyful discrimination...
David Michaels plays both the storyteller and Azdak in the Brechtian tradition, a very difficult one for an actor to follow. It requires that he not only play his character with full emotional understanding of the role, but that he communicate to the audience the fact that he is an actor, making his own judgement of what the character does. Azdak is Brecht's ideal man, sympathetic to the aspirations of the masses, never condemning their immorality or brutality, and always ready to assume whatever mask his situation requires. In danger of being executed by the henchmen of the governor...
...twenty scene changes. All of them were carried off with the height of economy, and the sets themselves are perfectly adapted to the actors' needs and they are not only beautiful but even manage to be a satire on the tone of certain of the scenes, in the Brechtian manner...
Eric Bentley, at the University for the year while on leave from Columbia, where he is Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature, is a forty-four year old Englishman whose name is intertwined with that of Bertolt Brecht. Through his translations, and explanations of the complex Brechtian theories of epic drama, he has been chiefly responsible for the German playwright's recent surge of popularity. An anthologizer, translator, producer, and director, Bentley today looms as one of the most respected and acute commentators on the theatrical scene...
...achieve a vaguely Finnish atmosphere: bracing and sparse. The series of unpretentious, easily-changeable settings (designed by Robert Skinner and Lorna Kreuger) have a good deal to do with this; the backdrops for successive scenes are frankly mounted on a large picture frame, and the effect is never more Brechtian than when substantial sections look as if they were made out of old packing-crates. The folkish songs composed (or, sometimes, borrowed) by Caldwell Titcomb, and sung mostly by Johanna Linch, are also highly atmospheric. These are the familiar devices of Brecht's "Epic Theatre" staging, but it seems...