If Brecht had not become Brecht, his early, obscure plays, like Kleinbuergerhochzeit would never ever be staged. But of course Brecht went on to become Brecht, and so the Berliner Ensemble is proud to present anything he dished out as a youth, in addition to his classic, mature plays. It’s not necessarily a bad play: all I’m saying is that if I had written the KBHZ, I’d be collecting rejection letters right now.
The one-act play doesn’t have much in the way of a plot. It really belongs to that genre, now usurped by television, called a situation comedy. All of the action occurs during a small weding banquet, if you can call action the pathetic strife of the satirized bourgeoisie to keep its life and its house from falling apart. In this production, it is the set designer that comes to the play’s rescue. Etiene Pluss has designed and executed an engineering wonder: Guests fall through the floor, chairs come apart, punches fly through the walls, and the entire house rocks back and forth when the guests lean over their soup.
This is much more scenery – and much less playing space – than the BE is used to. The entire house rises up from the floor at the beginning of the play on a very long and narrow platform, almost entirely occupied by a long banquet table. The guests have very little space to manoeuvre. The tighter the space, however, the more opportunities for some seriously acrobatic physical comedy. Brecht already hinted at the possibility when he dictated that the house’s chairs should be falling apart, but this production takes the metaphor of a disintegrating household to the extreme!
It’s not typical Brecht, and it’s not typical BE – they even have colored costumes and wigs, imagine! But there seems to be something changing at the BE, and ironically it’s most evident in their new productions of some of Brecht’s own early plays – Drums in the Night is also a scenic extravaganza compared to the house style. It’s also an atypical 90 minutes short, though still a considerable inflation of Brecht’s diminutive farce – music makes up a lot of the extra time.
It’s also one that even audiences without good German can enjoy – I had never read the play when I first saw it two years ago done by highschool students in Brecht’s hometown. There is one word you need to know though: schwanger, means pregnant. That explains everything!
