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:
“To expect to increase prices and then to maintain them at a higher level by means of a plan which must of necessity increase production while decreasing consumption is to fly in the face of an economic law as well established as any law of nature.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)