Bertolt Brecht's The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny
In the following essay I will be describing the process of adapting Brecht’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”. I will be detailing the elements of epic theatre that were used. I will be discussing the final production of “Baobabia” as a comment on social and personal freedoms and how I felt about the play, the message as well as the process.
Bertolt Brecht (originally known as Eugene Bertolt Friedrich Brecht), was born into a bourgeois (belonging to middle class, materialistic values) family in Augsburg, Germany on 10 February 1898 and died August 14th 1956 in East Berlin. Brecht was a German poet, playwright and theatrical reformer (epic theatre). His antibourgeois attitude was a reflection of his generation’s disappointment in the state of civilisation. He had friends who were members of the Dadaist group, an anti-aesthetic
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We played with the idea of poor theatre by using minimal props. We used crates instead of chairs and tables. The road leading to Baobabia is not only a “poor” representation of a road but the branding on it creates the symbolism of perhaps the road leading to consumerism (in the form of Baobabia).
The two main aims of Epic Theatre is that the message you are trying to convey must be clear and that the audience remains critically aware. It needs to inspire people to go out and solve social problems addressed in the play and according to Marx alienation is necessary before the desire for change can arise []2 .
Although it is easy to assume that the aim of Brecht’s play is only to crudely criticise “bourgeois opera in form and content” and bluntly critique the “injustices of capitalism”[]3 , the message goes much deeper than that. It all ties in with the notion of freedom. The social and personal freedoms portrayed in Baobabia according to my current knowledge include, but are not limited to
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