THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE

Bertolt Brecht in Santa Monica.

Bertolt Brecht joined many writers, artists and intellectuals in exile in 1932, when Hitler came to power. It was in exile that his finest plays were written:the first version of The Life of Galileo Galilei; (1938) Mother Courage And Her Children (1938) The Good Person of Setzuan (1940) and Herr Puntila and his Servant Matti (1941.) In 1941, after trekking from Denmark to Finland, where, in both countries, friends looked after him and allowed him to write, and where his plays were staged, Brecht finally got a visa to go to the United States where he joined many other intellectual exiles from Germany.

His circle included W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Charlie Chaplin and, later, Charles Laughton. Yet Brecht's six years in the United States were less productive than his years of European exile and in terms of getting his work produced, were totally barren until his collaboration with Charles Laughton on an English version of The Life of Galileo Galilei. He was not comfortable in the United States; he detested Los Angeles and the Hollywood lifestyle and was appalled by the commercialism of the theatre. He made an effort to break into Hollywood on its own terms but Hollywood was not interested in him. At the same time he alienated many people, including some of the circle mentioned above.

Nor did he get on with representatives of the left theater such as Clifford Odets. For Brecht, Odets was too taken up with the condition of the petty bourgeois family to represent a genuine radicalism: and anyhow, by the time Brecht got to know Odets, Odets was tailoring his talent to Hollywood. Odets, like Brecht, had to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but, unlike Brecht, he caved in before it.

To earn a living Brecht worked on movie scenarios, the most memorable of which, it is said (I have not seen it) was Hangmen Also Die on which he collaborated with the director, Fritz Lang. There had been plans originating with Orson Welles to get Charles Laughton to make a movie of Galileo but the potential backer backed out. The major production of these years was that of the play, The Life of Galileo Galilei, with Charles Laughton, in Los Angeles in 1947. It ran for 17 performances before the backers got cold feet over the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Other plays he wrote in America include The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, where Brecht depicts Hitler as a Chicago gangster; The Visions of Simone Machard - a non-epic play that even contains visitations by an angel to a French servant girl who refuses to collaborate with the Nazis; and a play taken from Jaroslav Hacek's The Good Soldier Schweyk, (Schweyk In the Second World War) and, between 1944-45, The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

How much of these plays or the earlier ones were written by Brecht, and how much by collaborators like Elizabeth Hauptmann whose work he simply appropriated, is now a matter of dispute. John Fuegi has uncovered the ‘scandal’ of how Brecht’s collective’ playwriting group, the ‘Brecht Collective’ was run by Brecht, both before and after the war, on the most exploitative basis where he got others to write the bulk of the plays, signed contracts with publishers and took all or most of the royalties.

Works like The Threepenny Opera, Happy End, The Mother, might be substantially by Elizabeth Hauptmann. But it was Brecht’s name that ensured the big royalties. This subject is controversial. However, there is no doubt Brecht was a fine poet; we have poems and plays undeniably by him; but it seemed he had great difficulty composing whole plays. Brecht probably made a virtue of the episodic plot in which it would be easier to insert the work of others.

Brecht, without doubt, is a major artist of 20th. century theatre. Most likely, he was the guiding force of the ‘Brecht Collective’ even if he was its exploiter. Brecht once defended his authorial practices in a radical paper by saying he had “a fundamental laxity in questions of literary property” which sounds disarmingly honest: however, as Fuegi points out, this did not apply his own literary property, which he jealously guarded and profited from - even when it wasn’t his own work. It was only others literary property that was up for grabs.

One joke going the rounds in Berlin in the 30’s went:
“Who is the play by?” The other person replies, “Brecht”
At which the first says, “Then who is the play by?”

It seems Brecht’s habits did not change when he went into exile or during his last years in East Berlin.

After leaving the United States in 1947, and wandering Europe again (Austria, Switzerland) with no prospect of working in West Germany, Brecht moved to communist East Germany in 1948 with his substantial Swiss Bank account and an Austrian passport. Brecht was given his own theater, (The Theater am Schiffbauerdamm) and built up the finest theater company in Europe.

He always saw theater as a collaborative activity, not as the creation of a single imagination. It is this idea that a play is the result of teamwork, between translator (Elizabeth Hauptmann) composer - Kurt Weil, Paul Dessau, Hindemith and so on, - actors and designers - that is Brecht's major contribution to modern drama, the transformation of its nature. This idea itself emerged from collaboration with other theater people: Piscator, Caspar Neher, and others.

The concept of a collective and collaborative theater has been taken up bymany post-Brechtian companies: Joan Littlewood’s theater ; the Living Theater, the Open Theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Bread and Puppet theater., Squat, the Wooster Group. Caryll Churchill and many British theater groups are similar, creating works out of group collaboration.

Brecht set himself against the Modernist tradition in theater inaugurated by Ibsen and helped to set theater in a wholly new direction. He did not do this in isolation: others were also taking theater in this direction, notably Erwin Piscator. But Brecht justified this move by the results he achieved, both in Germany in the pre-Hitler years, and in East Germany after 1948.

Setting up the Berliner Ensemble was the logical culmination of his career in drama: which was not to write masterpieces but to revolutionize the performing art of theater. The plays produced in East Berlin were mostly plays by others adapted to the performing methods of his company. Major adaptations now included The Days of the Commune by the Norwegian dramatist, Nordahl Grieg and Antigone, from Hølderlin's famous German translation. Productions of the Berliner Ensemble were the work of the whole ensemble in very long rehearsal periods (up to a year) with discussions with everyone involved.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Brecht's last major play, was written in Santa Monica, in exile. It had its premiere in East Berlin in 1954. It is also, incidentally, the last in a procession of plays about women as mothers: these include The Mother, Mother Courage and her Children, Senora Carrar's Rifles, and The Good Person of Setzuan. This theme probably owes a great deal to Helene Weigel, Brecht's tolerant wife and leading actress and to Elizabeth Hauptmann, Ruth Berlau, Magarete Steffin, his equally tolerant mistresses and collaborators. But it might represent Brecht’s desire to locate the more protective, nurturing qualities that might permit our humanity a future.

Brecht and Melodrama
In The Caucasian Chalk Circle Brecht frankly revives many of the
devices of melodrama, both in silent film and theater:

a. The endangered Innocents rescued at the last minute.
b. The simplistic scheme of Good and Evil
Clarifying the world for the popular audience.
c. The perilous journey fraught with Amazing Dangers (the
pursuit of the Ironsides, the swaying bridge)
d. The schematic dramatic psychology
e. The lovers' heartbreaking misunderstanding and the heroine's
seeming total defeat.
f. The miraculous rescue, lovers' reunion, villain's discomfiture.

This structure of melodrama was perfect for Brecht's purpose - a new theater for the people, and especially for an audience without guilt. The Caucasian Chalk Circle is Brecht's most assured, most skillful play and a brilliant demonstration of the effectiveness of the Epic Theater. One of the problems Brecht solves is how to maintain dramatic interest in a play whose characters are conceived, deliberately, one-dimensionally and simplistically.

The play is what William Empsom called "a version of pastoral" in which the problems of simple characters (shepherds and shepherdesses) are presented for the entertainment of more sophisticated folk. (Shakespeare uses the form often: where the court retires to observe how simple folk go through the same love-plots, etc. as their more complex -and guilty - betters The theme is most fully represented in As You Like It and The Winters Tale.)

Brecht reverses the pastoral convention - which had been to validate the values of the aristocrat order by making clear the cultural gulf between the charming but naive yokels and the sophisticated consciousness observing them. Even in yokel disguise characters like Perdita reveal the aristocratic qualities shining through.

Brecht's reversal re-affirms a basic innocence and goodness found in the peasants in contrast to the guilty aristocrats and their violent, unjust world. It is interesting that Brecht likes to go back to the peasant class for his versions of pastoral: not to the more awkward industrial proletariat. In fact, Brecht rarely sets his actions in the modern bourgeois world, preferring the historical past or conditions that allow a more simplistic humanity: a remote time and place before the complexly defined human identity found in modern cities.

To counteract the limited psychological interest of the play's individual characters, Brecht's dramaturgy creates a dimension of aesthetic complexity. Such episodes as Grusha sitting by the baby and yielding to the temptation of goodness where her unspoken thought processes and those she could never speak are described to us by the Singer; Azdak's instruction to the Grand Duke how a peasant eats his food; the formulaic love declaration of Simon and Grusha; the use of the glockenspiel to make the sound of melting ice which signals the end of winter and of Grusha's welcome in her brother's house; and the interventions by the Singer to supply the complex realities the characters cannot articulate are ways in which Brecht's theater addresses our sophisticated attention. The lighting and sound and music and props and costumes are subtle forms of theater commentary.

The method can be somewhat hazardous. I've seen limp and flat productions of the play where episode after episode just does not 'take off' - even the wedding-funeral can go terribly flat. It is difficult to find the ‘controlling spirit' to carry a production over the separate episodes. A reason for this hazardous quality, is that the dramatic characters, deliberately, are interesting only in their situations, not in their identities. They have no pasts, no ambiguities, no complex drives.

Their circumstances are explained entirely in external terms: their class status and the social situation making them act as they do: where, it seems, the higher the class the worse the character. Grusha's brother and sister-in-law, as property owners, already begin to reveal those signs of distorted humanity which reach their extremes in the Governer's wife and the Fat Prince. These external depictions lack analysis of how the characters became what they are or how the world became the violent place it is. The peasant characters are the guilt-free meek who will inherit the Utopian future of the Prologue without having to commit violence to get it. Identities seem determined purely by class condition.

Characters without complex motivation or guilt are hard to invest with dramatic interest. Guilt and layered dimensions of the psyche have kept up dramatic interest since the plays of Aeschylus. It has been the focus of dramatic interest far more than external circumstances. Proletarians may be more innocent than the bourgeoisie but they are generally less interesting as dramatic characters. Grusha and Simon are humans from whom everything individual, awkward, challenging, disturbing, has been removed.

The problem of evil.
Marxists, unlike Freudians, have a hard time accounting for human evil. How did it originate? If it arose out of human nature, its mesh of biological and psychological drives, how can we have confidence in a Utopian future free of this complex of guilt and oppression. To say it originated in class difference does not solve the problem, as Freud pointed out. How did the class divisions arise in the first place? If from greedy self-interests, how can we ensure these will not always re-appear?

These problems originated with the Enlightenment concept that humanity in its natural state is good and that it was corrupted by civilization which brought in oppressive institutions, superstitions, and the need violently to defend them. But, again, we are left with the problem, what was it in humanity that brought these oppressive conditions into being? For the Christian, it is original sin; for the Hegelian it is the result of the human drive to self-determination coming against that same drive in others. Hegelians believe the human spirit, through conflict, gains greater freedom and self-determination: but that conflict is inescapable. For the Freudian, the human capacity for violence and self-destructive behavior comes from the necessary but destructive suppression of our instinctual drives which serves the cause of repressive civilization. (Civilization and Its Discontents) Brecht reflects the Marxian claim that violent and self-destructive human behavior comes from inequalities within the economic system of ownership of productive power: a conflict that inevitably will work its way to the victory of a guilt--free proletariat - the first class to come to power without guilt.

Brecht shifts the focus for evil from human motives to external conditions: there are bloody and violent times in which men and women suffer and are misled into wrong actions. Although he shows self-destructive behavior, as in the Governor's refusal to face up to the danger he is in; the short-sighted selfishness of his wife; the treachery of the Fat Prince; the thuggish behavior of the Ironsides - Brecht then has to separate this from the basic humanity he believes exists underneath all this that is being distorted from its human norm - in such characters as Grusha and Simon and the people whom Azdak rescues when he is judge. His evil characters seem not to spring from the same humanity as his innocent characters. Episodes of violence are presented but not analyzed so that the origin of the violence is never accounted for. Brecht, nevertheless, creates powerful images of disorder, violence, with flashes of human solidarity, hilarious anarchy, as in the wedding-funeral: it is presented as "out there" in the world, externalized.

THE FUTURE TIME
The Prologue sets out an image of the end of history - what unexploited and unexploiting humanity will be like, coming to friendly and reasonable agreement over the distribution of land. It is a poignant image precisely because it is unreal: unlike the grim way communism dealt with land redistribution in Soviet Russia; or how land still is being fought over and appropriated today all over the world.

Brecht knows this: the Prologue is an act of faith in the future not in the present, an image of a rational, good-tempered humanity. How can the humanity that gives us the "bloody times" of the story of the Chalk Circle become the humanity of the Prologue? There is no way to get from that violent past to this Utopian future. When Azdak disappears from the scene at the end of the play (with its festivities and dancing), as if he no longer is needed, nothing convinces us that the mere eradication of the oppressors have laid foundations for the Prologue's Utopia.

Azdak, schooled in canny, crooked wisdom, was needed to bring about the solution: but this cannot guarantee the bloody times won't return because Grusha and Simon - and multitudes like them, are not equipped to prevent the evil times from returning. Brecht hopes that his own sorrowful and earthy realism will be able to disappear in the same way Azdak disappears; when the art of a socialist Utopia will have no need of him. But is it true that the peasants and proletariat are free of guilt and violence?

Grusha and Simon remind one of Lady Bracknell's observation, "Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound." Brecht agrees with Lady Bracknell and refuses his innocent characters any disturbing self-knowledge - or much knowledge of the world. Is Brecht right? Does violence only come from those who have, for some inexplicable reason, unjustly seized power? Of the many millions who followed Hitler were only the bourgeoisie and upper classes guilty? Brecht might plead that only violent circumstances distort the Ironsides to behave as they do: or cause the Serbs to massacre thousands of Bosnian Muslims. But can ordinary humanity can be let off so easily?

Brecht's brilliant dramaturgy gives aesthetic sophistication to his simplistic philosophy. If these theatrics fail in a production there is not much else to interest, because his picture of humanity, like all pastoral literature, is unconvincing. His belief in a fundamentally innocent humanity arbitrarily distorted by historical circumstances, allows him to show a great deal of sympathy with trapped and baffled characters, like Anna Fierling (Mother Courage) or Grusha. The earthy Azdak is more a product of wishful self-projection than of rational analysis: canny, artful, watchful, knowing too much to be innocent, but on the side of the innocents; needing to believe in the goodness of Granny Grusinia, the Robin Hood motives of the Bandit or the decency of Grusha and Simon.

He created a myth of the posterity that will escape our dark times, a posterity who will have the luxury to be surprised at the violent subject matter of Brecht's writing, at his anger and indignation. That posterity, partly through Brecht's own work, will live in Utopia. The anachronistic Singer in the Prologue brings his story of violence, civil war and suffering from the distant past and asks to be allowed to tell it to the Soviet group who do not need it and who are setting about rationally reconstructing their country. The Soviet group is a little impatient and hopes the story will not be too long.

The Singer, who we can see as Brecht himself insists on telling the whole story, perhaps as a warning to those in utopia: though, as a good Marxist, Brecht would believe that this utopia is the end of human injustice, therefore of all oppressive history; that therefore the Utopians would not need the lesson of the story. But Brecht knew it was not safe to forget. This plea by the Singer to tell his story is very touching; Brecht, in East Germany, was continually attacked by the authorities for his ‘formalism’ and experimentalism: of not toeing the Stalinist Social-Realist line.

The Singer’s story creates distinct and powerful theater: presenting violence, injustice and suffering even if it cannot explain it: and presenting it in ways that get us to 'see' it in new ways - the estrangement effect. The Caucasian Chalk Circle brings out Brecht's ability to create, in the best sense, a naive art, an image of how we would like to be, perhaps, even if we know better. For Brecht and many others, this myth is probably the only way of keeping faith or keeping sanity. He wrote a poem on a Chinese mask of an enraged man, the veins standing out of his forehead, and Brecht writes how the mask shows what an effort it takes to be evil. Natural man is good, evil is a distorting mask which will be put aside forever when Utopia arrives.

ANALYSIS OF THE PLAY:
The Prologue presents a version of pastoral. These are peasants not of the city and its complexities. Their dispute is the oldest one in the Bible, of Cain and Abel: the shepherds (goats) vs. the agriculturalists, the orchard growers. The myth originates from Mesopotamia for we find it, along with the Flood, in Sumerian literature, before the Old Testament version. Brecht would have known this: the hero of his first play was named after the Near Eastern god, Baal. So it seems human history, as set out in the very bloody times of biblical chronicles, is a pre-utopian constant.

At one point, the Singer quotes Mayakovsky: an interesting choice because Mayakovsky was a dramatic artist who continually ran afoul of the Soviet authorities and committed suicide. The homage here is subversive. Brecht is pleading for the place of art even at a time of urgent social reconstruction for utopia: and so his Singer stubbornly refuses to shorten his story. (Brecht's plays were not popular in Soviet Russia.)

The Singer now brings into the present, the olden times, the bloody times, by drawing on an old Chinese fable, The Chalk Circle which Brecht's friend, the German poet Klabund, had made a beautiful version of in the 1920's. Klabund's wife, Carola Neher, a close friend of Brecht's, was executed in Russia as one of Stalin's victims. So this 'simple' opening of the play is bristling with ambiguities.

1. The Noble Child
When the play begins the magic of Brecht's method is apparent; the sudden summoning into the theater of all the figures from the old story who manifest themselves as at a séance, and the Singer comments on their destinies. This brilliant presentation allows us to accept the extreme one-dimensionality of the characters who resemble Morality Play figures, each with one salient characteristic. The story opens on a scene of plotting by the princes leading to violence, the overthrow and execution of the Governor, and the flight of the Governor’s wife. The working people, the Weavers, stage a revolt and are savagely suppressed. This is the endless cycle of violence in pre-Marxian, unjust times.

All this is swiftly and economically presented in telescoped stage time: a swift panorama of people briefly in and violent out of power. When the Governor’s wife flees, leaving behind her baby that no-one dares touch, Brecht stages a beautiful scene where the servant girl, Grusha, gives in to the ‘temptation of goodness’. After all the noise and movement of the palace coup, this is a moment of reflective stillness as Grusha sits beside the baby. The lights dim and Grusha lights a lamp. In seconds, a whole night and the next morning passes onstage. Grusha rises, takes the child, and begins her long journey of misadventures.

Brecht. is able to combat a major problem of pastoral art: either it is inarticulate and therefore uninteresting: or, if the pastoral folk become articulate, they are no longer pastoral. By having the Singer express what Grusha cannot say we get the complexity of the situation stated while Grusha remains true to her innocent self.

In his Berliner Ensemble staging (1954) Brecht used a turntable, so that it was as if the landscape and all its dangers and tribulations were constantly coming towards Grusha relentlessly, one scene after another. Through the journey, we see the bond between Grusha and the baby increase through tribulations: a lesson in motherhood, the bond formed by recognition of need and mutual dependence. I think Brecht deliberately used the PERILS OF PAULINE silent movie format (one can imagine the piano accompaniment).

The sequence is:

1.] Heroine and Baby escaping the horrid IRONSHIRTS.
2.] Heroine and baby crossing the rotten bridge over the abyss
3.] Famished Heroine encountering the cruel sister in law and
cowardly brother.
4] Heroine and baby about to be cast out into the snow.
5] Heroine forced to marry the ‘dying’ Groom
6] Grusha encounters Simon and they part.

This sequence includes the hilarious social/comedy of the wedding to the dying peasant: with the embarrassed and parsimonious mother of the Groom, the nosy wedding-funeral guests; the malicious Monk and the resurrection of the dying groom, Yussup, when he hears he no longer faces the draft. This wonderful sequence is tough to stage and can fall flat: it needs to be as earthy as Breughel’s peasant scenes and played larger than life: exuberantly, as a form of Carnival.

18. It provides a thematic bridge to the next Azdak sequence: the disorderly aspect of the wedding feast and the Monk and the Groom share many of Azdak’s carnivalesque qualities. Azdak will usher in a brief reign of ‘justice’ and the wedding feast is a glimpse of the world Azdak belongs to. “Carnival’ is a means of overthrowing Order and hierarchy, of proclaiming the liberation of the body and the emotions.

19 The Story of Azdak. - RESCUER OF THE INNOCENTS
The Azdak sequence proclaims that in an unjust society whose laws protect the rich against the poor and is biased on the side of power, the ordinary victim can only get justice by an abuse of the already abusive laws. A dutiful magistrate of an unjust legal system enforces injustice. Only a corruptible judge can undo the injustice of customary law and create true justice.

This last section of the play now reels back in time to the overthrow of the Governor and Grand Duke; the uprising of the Weavers that is suppressed; the day on which Grusha took the child. It is out of this chaos that the drunken Azdak is appointed Judge.

The somewhat complicated plot is as follows:

1. Azdak came across a man fleeing from the authorities
2. He gave him shelter and allowed him to escape. He turns out to
have been the Grand Duke
3. Azdak believes the weavers’ revolt has succeeded and comes
forward to confess to saving the GRAND DUKE -
4. He hopes, by this confession to escape punishment in case the
Weavers find out what he has done.
5. But the Weavers’ revolt has been put down: the Princes are in
power and need the support of the Ironshirts.
6. In the chaos the Ironshirts appoint Azdak as Judge.

Azdak reigns for two years, overturning all the usual rulings and procedures and making enemies of the rich. He openly takes bribes, makes outrageous (but rational) rulings, and manages to look after downtrodden victims like Granny Grusinia. After the two years, the Grand Duke is restored to power, the Governor’s Wife comes back to claim her child in order to gain the Abashwilli estates and the case comes before Azdak. However, with the restoration of the old order, the people he offended (the rich farmers) have him arrested. He is about to be hanged when an order from the grateful Grand Duke re-appoints him Judge. So now he can try the case of the rightful mother and another case, an old couple who want a divorce.

The trial of the chalk circle comes from folk legend but Azdak's ruling also derives from the biblical Judgment of Solomon. A conventional Judge would have given the child to Natella Abashwalli. In normal times Simon and Grusha would have been helpless and punished. Their natural innocence makes them vulnerable. Only the amoral outcast, Azdak, can save them.
“He broke the law to save them”
In a dark age of injustice it is the lawbreaker who is just.

But he warns them to leave the area and he himself ‘disappears’ in the final festivities - the implication being that the ‘dark times’ have returned after only a momentary interlude of justice. The people of Grusinia lose as the Princes re-establish control and the country awaits the next palace coup. So we must go back to the Prologue for the solution and the play closes with a strong reference to the Prologue
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Brecht and Gotthold Lessing
The play recalls Lessing's method in 'Nathan The Wise' - a rationalist Enlightenment work that did not delve into psychological motives but similarly set out to proclaim a new kind of human community using such devices as the parable of the Ring and the sudden metamorphoses of cultural identity at the end of the play to remind us this is only a theatrical solution showing what life might be, not what it is. Like Brecht, Lessing also emphasizes the external situation over the inner, psychological: like Brecht he can create images of evil (the Patriarch) in a context of general human goodness, but cannot account for how evil arises.

Eric Bentley called the two plays The Good Person of Sechuan and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, ‘Parables for the Theater: a good description, for they have the quality of parables, of using their situations to clearly point their moral - by standing outside the characters and their situations and commenting on them from (Marxian) perspectives denied to the protagonists. The cowardly brother, the selfish sister-in-law, the 'dying' draft dodger, and the various figures that come up for judgment before Azdak are emblematic, usually standing for some single quality of human nature: often for a profession, as doctor, lawyer, adjutant and so on. The complexity lies in the dramatist's commentary on the characters and situations.

Even Brecht's simplifications are 'complex' - they are sophisticated as pastoral is sophisticated. The Adjutant' brief presence is a good example: Brecht need imply only the slightest hint of his intrigue with the Governor's wife, to suggest the intricate treacheries of those in high office. That is as much as we need know.

Behind the figure of Azdak is the sophisticated idea that when the laws favor those in power the only hope for justice is a judge who can be corrupted, bribed. For at least he has no illusion he is upholding the purity and dignity of the Law. When the system is oppressive it is worst when it is working dutifully; like a rigorous servant of the Inquisition or a conscientious Guantanamo torturer. Azdak himself is not complicated. He is depicted as the sensual and cynical outsider who sees through all conventional society's pretenses of rigor and probity. He comes to power only in a time of disorder and his reign ends when Order is restored. His sensuality makes him sympathetic to the innocent victims and comparatively tolerant of such villains as the young Blackmailer or Ludovica and St. Banditus.

Until Utopia, Disorder may bring more hope than Order. This idea goes all the way back to Brecht's earliest period; such anarchic plays from Baal to The Threepenny Opera. Azdak sings a song in praise of Chaos in Egypt, a poem taken from an ancient Egyptian text lamenting the overthrow of Order. Brecht commented that, from the point of view of the oppressed, a time of disorder was a blessing. The Song is just another way of looking at the theme of disorder and Order, an 'estranging' of the subject for a moment, getting us to see it in a new light. Brecht's plays invite us to reflect ironically and paradoxically - both liberating modes of thinking.

Brecht's lack of consistency is one of his best qualities: he does not let us make easy judgments. The final "Judgment of Solomon" scene with Azdak manages to make justice out of paradox. The corrupt judge awards the child to the mother who stole him and who refuses to allow the child to become heir to wealth and position. Rightful possession is proved by the use one will put ownership too: and so the story reaches out to the orchard growers and the shepherds of the Prologue's Utopia. Azdak disappears and is to be remembered as having instituted a brief Golden Age: but the Singer ends by addressing the utopian audience of the New (Marxian) Golden Age. We in the auditorium presumably are still living in "the Olden time, the bloody time"

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