Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle

The audience’s understanding of a text is altered by the society in which they live. Bertolt Brecht’s 1944 Epic play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, is a politically inflected play that interrogates notions of justice in a capitalist society. The prologue functions as a primer for the story and sets up the conflicting political ideologies of socialism and capitalism which inform the audience’s reading of the play performed by the singer Arkadi Cheidze. The play within a play, split into two episodes, is a parable of the peasant mother Grusha fighting for custody of her adopted son against his noble, biological mother; the episodes are connected by the singer in the converging stories of the judge Azdak and Grusha in her trial. Through a Marxist

The play was written in 1944 which was a period of ideological conflict due to the emergence of extreme ideologies during WWII. The oppression from fascist Nazi Germany and the power of communist Soviet Russia was displayed during the war exposing the world to both extremes of the political spectrum. Consequently, nations tried to maintain a distance from being associated with extreme political ideologies in fear of recent events. In his exile in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Brecht witnessed the social structures of communist, Liberal and democratic nations (Sweden, Finland and America respectively) in his travels. This informed his political alignment and hence his socialist stance presented in The Caucasian Chalk

This is shown in Grusha’s grandpa’s dialogue, “the soldiers from the city took our goats,” symbolically revealing how the bourgeois capitalise on their powerlessness to exploit them to gain more control. They control the means of production by forcefully limiting their supply and access to resources. Their restrictions decrease the supply and the price of milk “has gone up” due to the high demand that they made. This demonstrates the Marxist view that the bourgeois monopolises the means of production to exploit the proletariat, despite already having enormous wealth. From a modern Australian context, where a free market exists, I recognised this exploitative capitalist practice as a product of an aristocratic society that disempowers its citizens and as Brecht’s opposition to capitalism. Furthermore, the lack of political power possessed by the proletariat led to the disregard of their rights. Natella calls their homes “miserable slum houses” and decides to tear them down “to make room for a garden.” Her casual disregard and indifference to the desperate capitalise on their lack of political representation which disables the proletariat from the capability to protect their homes. Another point to consider is that not only are the Abashvillis planning to strip them of their homes, but they also raised the taxes to fund this project as