Brecht, A Choice of Evils, Martin Esslin. Eyre & Spottiswoode. 36/-.
it may seem foolhardy to criticise a book which Eric Bentley has called “the best thing that has yet been written about Brecht in any language”, and Ken Tynan “a brilliantly perceptive study of the most ambiguous and perpetually fascinating figure of the 20th-century theatre”. Messrs. Bentley and Tynan are, after all, men of the Left. Both knew Brecht personally; and both know as much as anybody about Brecht’s significance for the modern theatre. Why, then, have they followed the ‘bourgeois’ critics in praising a work that, in effect, contradicts all that Brecht stood for?
The most charitable explanation, of course, is that they did it for love of Brecht, believing that any kind of publicity for Brecht and his ideas is better than none. And it should be said at once that there is a great deal in Mr. Esslin’s book to which nobody could take exception. About half the book consists of biography; this is extremely interesting in itself, and is a useful supplement to Mr. Willett’s largely nonbiographical The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (Methuen, 36/-). Most of it is, inevitably, political biography; and there is no doubt that this part of the book will be deeply resented by Brecht’s friends and pupils in East Berlin. They will take it as Cold War propaganda of the most vicious kind. Whether they will be right, I’m not sure—since I’m not sure what Mr. Esslin really intends with his many ‘revelations’ about Brecht’s troubles with the Party. These troubles are not just a chimera of Mr. Esslin’s imagination (I heard something of them myself in East Berlin). But what do they prove? If Mr. Esslin is telling us that the Communist Parties are the modern strongholds of Philistia, do we still need to be told that? Brecht anticipated trouble in East Berlin, and got it: but he also got, what nobody in the West had offered him, a theatre of his own where he could work out his ideas. In choosing the East, Brecht would have said he was choosing the greater, because the more practical, freedom.