Bertolt Brecht’s first full-length play received its belated Berlin première here at the Deutsches Theater in 1926, revised from the version he had written eight years earlier as a 20-year-old student. He continued to tinker with the piece, but it’s probably safe to say that none of his variants mentions Baal in a gorilla suit throttling a Sophie who wears the rictus grin of Batman’s foe the Joker.

Director Stefan Pucher rings the changes all right. Instead of a garret, the amoral poet/lover Baal lives in something akin to an air traffic control tower. He not only has forebears, in the form of a mother, but four bears with whom he debates at one point. Each of the other four actors takes multiple roles, as in a way does Christoph Franken as Baal, clambering in and out of costumes and at times entirely naked.

But where, say, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt goes through numerous reinventions all the while claiming to have remained himself throughout his life, the only real constant with Baal is his uncaring. The young Brecht was more concerned with referencing his influences, both positive (François Villon’s ne’er-do-well lifestyle, Georg Büchner’s proto-modernist writing style in his play Woyzeck) and negative (he wrote the play primarily as a counterblast to Hanns Johst’s The Lonely One), than with producing a piece of work which hangs together on its own terms.

This leaves Pucher free to throw in whatever he fancies, from Cabaret Voltaire-style costuming and a grotesque harlequin get-up for Baal to playing scenes on both recorded and live video complete with real-time selfies. Brecht has not yet found his epic, “alienating” approach to drama, so Baal occurs principally in a key of self-conscious poeticism, repeatedly referring to the sky with its unblinking gaze on the events down below. And just as Baal does not care about those he exploits and even murders, just as the sky does not care even about Baal himself, so we never find ourselves drawn to give a stuff about any of it. You could give it a Brechtian gloss by saying this is the brutal world of capital, but Brecht’s worlds are seldom this frenzied-yet-dull.
     
Written for the Financial Times.