Brecht poems pound home message

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This article was published 24/01/2002 (8650 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PATRONS of Fire Visions: The Poetry of Bertolt Brecht are met as they walk into the theatre with large banners screaming such messages as “Don’t gobble this up in a sensible manner” and “Shut up and think louder.”

Then the poetry performances begin, and his verse turns up the volume on his rhetoric on what he saw as on social injustice in corrupt capitalist society. His first piece, Great Babel Gives Birth, is an emphatic denunciation of Western decadence for delivering what sounds like freedom and justice but is actually war, “And it had a thousand fathers.”

No one ever accused Brecht of being subtle.

He saw himself as the blunt conscience of the proletariat and against those who turned a blind eye towards the beggars, the unemployed and the homeless. In 14 poems, well-assembled by director Hope McIntyre and her quartet of able performers, Brecht noisily pounds home his message.

Several works deal with babies and children, none as poignant as On the Infanticide Marie Farrar, which tells the story of an orphan minor who tries to have an abortion unsuccessfully. Marie is born anyway and left to die in a laundry shed. The poem’s prayer-like refrain, “Make not your anger manifest, for all that lives needs help from all the rest.”

The Winnipeg troupe selected Brecht pieces that have contemporary resonance and surrounded them with statistical evidence that the poverty and inequity of Brecht’s era lives on. Prior to United Front Song, the small turnout at Tuesday’s opening was told how many Manitobans used a food program each month and how the income of the poorest 20 per cent of society had dropped. The lights go up on the audience, who are then told, “He’ll want to eat and thanks a lot, But talk can’t take the place of meat.”

The four performers (Adam Bayne, Tracey Dempster, Jonathan Eaton and Lisa Whitt) were dressed in the typical Brecht stage uniform — in black and barefoot — and delivered the verse clearly, strongly and with welcome visual accompaniment. Whether Great Babel bore a baby puppet, or slide projections of refugee camps during the recitation of Eight Thousand Poor People Assembled Outside the City, the poems were all presented with trademark Brechtian flair.

An image of the twin towers of the World Trade Center is depicted with the telling of Late Lamented Fame of the Giant City of New York, a poem which predicts the downfall of skyscrapers in what the citizenry thought was an indestructible city. It is performed with the actors/New Yorkers rushing faster and faster around the stage, stopping every so often to erect a tower of building blocks marked with dollar signs. Brecht believed moral bankruptcy would bring down the buildings, not terrorists.

You have to hand it to Brecht, he keeps proving himself to be inconveniently pertinent.

Fire Visions

Sarasvati Productions

To Saturday at Colin Jackson Studio PTE

Tickets $10

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