THE BIG BRECHT FEST 2
Señora Carrar's Rifles / How Much Is Your Iron?
Young Vic Theatre, London SE1
Opened 24 April, 2007
***
In performance, direction and translation, this second double bill by
Bertolt Brecht comes well up to the admirable standard of its
predecessor earlier this month. Brecht was of course a writer of
immense political commitment, and it enriches our understanding to see
such naked agitprop pieces revived. But does my discomfort increase
because ours is an age beyond such simple protests, or rather because
we continue to feel chastened by these kind of direct exhortations even
at a lifetime's remove?
Señora Carrar's Rifles
(1937) is an anti-Franco polemic. The title character, having already
lost a husband in the Spanish Civil War, tries to protect her sons by
keeping them at home and refusing to give the dead man's arms cache to
her militiaman brother. Biyi Bandele's translation is simple and
direct, and director Paul Hunter shows his more familiar comic bent
only in brief radio-broadcast sequences. Sandy McDade is a typical
Brechtian heroine, unfussily and firmly declaring that they have to
live (in a few years' time McDade will make an excellent if unorthodox
Bernarda Alba), until the final twist wakes her political conscience. How Much Is Your Iron?,
premièred under an English pseudonym in 1938 and here translated
by Enda Walsh, is a fierce indictment of Swedish neutrality in the face
of Nazism. Amid a community of small traders, iron-seller Svendson
continues to deal with Elliot Levey's mad-eyed, smiling (and notably
un-mustachioed) Whatshisname even as the latter murders the Austrian
and Czech neighbours, seizes their goods, makes machine-guns and then
holds Svendson himself to commercial ransom. Orla O'Loughlin's
production takes place in mist and yellow-rusty light, as if matters
are visibly tainted from the first.
Both pieces are punctuated by basso rumbles and tremors which both
sound warlike and remind us of the double-bill's subtitle, The Earthquakes To Come. And yet
the unambiguous mentality of "If you are not with us, you are against
us" (explicitly stated by the brother in the Spanish play) so exalted
here is precisely the attitude I had seen elsewhere being dissected
with regard to Bush and Blair's Iraq policy in Called To Account on the previous
night. Commitment is laudable when we agree with it, otherwise it is
deplorable fanaticism; and hindsight is one of our most precious gifts.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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