Production History
Drums in the Night, a "Comedy in Five Acts by Bertolt Brecht", was given its premiere at the Munich Kammerspiele, opening on 29 September 1922. Otto Falckenberg - head of the Kammerspiele and renowned champion of new, controversial dramas in Weimar Germany - directed, set-design was by Otto Reigbert, and the cast included Erwin Faber (as a Guest from the National Theatre of Munich, the Residenztheater) in the main role of Andreas Kragler, Max Schreck (as Glubb), Hans Leibelt, Kurt Horwitz and Maria Koppenhöfer.
The play received another production at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, also directed by Falckenberg, which opened on the 20th December, 1922, with a cast of leading actors then in Berlin, including Alexander Granach as the soldier Andreas Kragler.
Falckenberg, who was the head of the Kammerspiele along with Benno Bing, directed the play in a manner that we would not now recognize as 'Brechtian', utilizing the angular, contorted poses typical of the theatre of Expressionism. Similarly, Reigbert's design consisted of contorted, angular lines and foreshortened perspectives (similar to those used in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920). "Brecht's sense of irony was misunderstood", Meech suggests; he was "far from happy with the result."
Elements of Expressionism, or perhaps "realistic-Expressistic" elements (according to Erwin Faber), can be found in designs for the Munich production. Reigbert's rendering for the set design for Act V of Drums in the Night, for example, contains a figure standing by the bridge that is very much like Edvard Munch's figure (also standing by a bridge) in his painting of 1893, The Scream.
According to Erwin Faber, whom Brecht had requested to play the principal role of Andreas Kragler, a German soldier who returns home after to the war:
- The play was...expressionistic, that is, realistic-expressionistic. It was born of the times, and I played it as such...By the time Brecht arrived, the period of Expressionism in Munich had already passed...The heyday of Expressionism came in the aftermath of World War I, when we were all exhausted by the war: hunger, suffering, and grief was in every family who had lost a loved one. There was a tension that could only be resolved by an outcry... was perhaps one of the last dramas to be played expressionisitically.
Read more about this topic: Drums In The Night
Famous quotes containing the words production and/or history:
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)