This year we have chosen the German playwright, Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle as the classic for our Blackball Bathhouse production. I’ve never directed a Brecht before. The cast size is usually formidable and there’s a sense that it needs a large stage and technical requirements that would be a challenge for the community scale on which I have always worked. And then there’s always the ‘mystery’ of his distancing techniques, using song, scene titles and exposing the techniques of illusion to prevent easy emotional involvement, with a lot of these techniques now run of the mill; but as well the sense that Brecht is very good at emotional involvement – who could ever forget the silent scream of Mother Courage as she discovers the death of her son?

I have though, worked a lot using the techniques of Augusto Boal, acknowledged as Brecht’s successor and someone who has more thoroughly realised Brecht’s aims of making the audience actively aware of the underlying structures of oppression. For Brecht remained in the mainstream theatre, in the West playing to the usual middle class theatre goer. In East Berlin, his theatre had state support and could operate without the stringencies of market forces. In the 21st century West, Brecht productions professionally have become few and far between but he is often produced by colleges and the amateur actor suits his work, except of late, the consumer – identity politics – social media- individual has a sense of personality that feels a long way away from the peasant or old time soldier.

As I worked on a manageable size script and something that will work in the old bathhouse, I have struggled to find a way in, to find a resonance that will make a production live. Slowly and unusually, I have begun to unpack and personally align with, the subjectivity at work, the personality of the writer, the psychological drivers, the social relations at work or desired, rather than the political dynamics and began to realise that this was his goal, to show the relations beneath oppressive economic and political systems and that this is, in our current society, a useful task. Think of the chaos of Trump era capitalism and the relations of greed, venality, violence and corruption at work, more important than the politics. In fact these social relations are the politics.  The market and nationalism are mere disguise.

And with Brecht there is the hope of better relations, of friendliness between strangers, of justice within a society, simple goals, surely realisable, but then? In fact the simplicity is almost overwhelming. Brecht’s aesthetic, which is what productions  often focus on, is tied to the mystifications of capitalism.  Underneath is this simple desire for a better world which is driving the almost boyishly naïve writer.