Steve_Bamlett_blog

Reflecting on reading and watching  plays – the case of Bertolt Brecht focusing on having booked to see Mrs Puntila and Her Man Matti At the Lyceum Edinburgh (a version by Denise Mina), March 21^st 2020. And having now read (for the first time) Brecht, B. (tr. Willet, J.) [1987] Mr Puntila and His Man Matt: A People’s Play London, Methuen Drama.

See https://lyceum.org.uk/whats-on/production/mrs-puntila-and-her-man-matti

When I go to plays with others, I’m often thought to be odd for wanting to know the text of the play, or a version thereof, before going. It is certainly true that nothing is better than living through a story, and how that story is enacted and told for the first time. So I thought that maybe I ought to reflect on why, even when I do not know a play other than by title as in this case, I feel I have to read a version first. Today I finished the play. And I know I’ll read King John again before I see the RSC production in April. But why?

First of all, I suppose my introduction to the theatre was mediated by school and university and the aim in these visits was often to get to know the play better for academic purposes. In those days, that meant knowing the original text in as accurate a way as possible. It didn’t take long through this process of trying to ‘know’ THE play to realise that the notion of a ‘original’ text was much more than a myth – it was often a lie. I didn’t need the example of Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare to know this – although in both establishing an original text is a very contested issue. It occurred to me also with regard to the many plays in the sixth form that I read, because they were so much cheaper, in French’s Acting Editions. These used the text of current or first productions and included changes made in the text for the purposes of producing them in specific venues for specific audiences. Sometimes the changes were not those of an author but of any and many a member of the production team – and in many ways this was even the more so for most dramatic texts. Hence, going to see and hear a play, and even reading it in certain editions were divorced from a notion that were accessing an ‘original’ form of that work of art.

These textual changes were though less important than devices used in the live production of all plays. The meanings available to an audience vary according to devices of basically 3 kinds:

• the use of body, and bodies in concert – including their products such as voices, sounds, gestures, tones, gait, proxemics and stance,
• a whole series of inset settings, from stage scenes, and changes thereof by any number of means, lighting, artificial effects, the stage form, theatre internal architecture, place of theatre and so on, and;
• the use of ‘properties’ and costume (including period items in both of these) that interacted with text or extended its meanings, such as a skull or pen and paper.

The meanings these elements introduced could have a radical offect on a playwright’s text. In effect that text is no longer able to dominate the making of meaning as far as an audience is concerned.

As an example let’s take this Brecht play revised by Denise Mina. Mina will certainly make textual changes. Some will reflect a focus that may or may not be in the ‘original’ if we can any longer speak of that. One major change is in the title – in that the title character is now a ‘Mrs’ rather than a ‘Mr’. The use of the symbolic title change mean this is not just a matter, as sometimes occurs, of opening up a major role to female actors whilst leaving the play neutral to issues of gender (or not as directorial and acting revisions will emphasise), but also to try the effect of this gender change in the play on the meanings produced by the play.

Thus it is clear that ‘Mrs Puntila and Her Man’ deliberately opens up the title to new interpretations. The relationship variables will appear here, at least in heteronormative terms, to be much more complex and not solved merely by explaining that to be someone’s ‘man’ here means only being that same someone’s paid servant. But whether those variants are used in the production is yet to be seen.

Certainly some effects will necessarily involve changes that will impact on a whole range of issues. For instance at the centre of the play the rich Finnish estate holder, Puntila, visits a hiring Fair in a local village, Lammi, to compete with other employers in choosing workers from a pool of unemployed persons, all men in the ‘original’. He is drunk at the time and when drunk, he acts ‘human’.

MATTI: … in the car, I can’t get away from him and before I know where I am he’s turning all human on me. I’ll have to give notice.

p. 31, Scene 5

This has two facets. First, he acts with decency and respect to people of a lower class than himself. Second, he makes no record of his decisions in that he acts on impulse. In particular he neglects, as his chauffeur, Matti, keeps reminding him, making contracts of employment based on his hiring decisions.

When sober then, Puntila can revert to making decisions based entirely on his own, and therefore his class’s, self-interest without worrying that he need honour his drunken decisions and the ‘human’ responses they were based upon. This gets very near to the play’s unrelenting but very funnily presented socialist core: that, in a capitalist society, the greatest thing we have to fear is the capitalist’s pretension to humanity, especially when the pretension acts to convince the capitalist himself of his own ‘essential’ human core. Such a core is an irrelevant fiction to capitalist relations between persons. What matters is binding legal mutual obligations.

PUNTILA, drinking: … I must start by telling them what kind of fellow I am so they can see if they are going to get on with me or not. That’s the question: what kind of fellow am I?

MATTI: Mr Puntila, none of them’s interested in that: they’re interested in their contract. …

(and later after promising a cushy job to a ‘weedy man’)

MATTI: Why not make him out a contract?

pp.28f. Scene 4.

In sc. 5 he reminds these workers: “I told you it was a mistake coming up here till you had contracts in your hands.” (p.31)

The lesson of the play is that a humanely regulated society is a myth in a capitalist or rentier-class society. Working men cannot rely in the dignity of labour but only on the strength of legal constraints on personal greed and inordinate power through contracts. Until the Revolution –

              They’ll find they have a master really cares

              Once they’re the masters of their own affairs.

END

Despite this uncompromising truth Brecht had in the long future of the play to continually fight to assert that his characters may be rich in soul but that this is an illusion amongst the many other contradictions of capitalism. In producing this play himself, he insisted on alienating audiences from Puntila – ensuring that they were not too made subject to the illusory warmth of his character, when drunk. He tried, amongst other things, masking his capitalists.

Here then is one reason why production matters and why the search for ‘original’ text and intentions under its surface is problematic in watching plays. However in this case – this text and this awaited Mina-Lyceum production, there is another issue. At the Hiring Fair, the drunken Puntila also casts a human eye on lower-class women, an illegal grog-seller and a milkmaid included. The lesson they learn is that male power (based on both gender and class) is dangerous precisely when it makes its most human face to those women. Marriage too is a contract and women remain powerless in an unequal society without such a real contract – a true ring rather than that used to affiance those women in Scene 3, old curtain rings. He says to the unwary telephonist whose life is:

TELEPHONIST: … Putting through phone calls, cooking potatoes and knowing everything, that’s my life.

PUNTILA: Then its high time you had a new one. And the quicker the better. send a wire to the area manager right away to say you’re marrying Puntila from Lammi. …

p. 23 Scene 4

Now without a job, this uncontracted marriage [despite the sham of legal drink (a very Scandiavian conceit) and curtain-ring] the Telephonist must earn that Puntila sober is neither aware of promises of a human non-legislated kind nor willing to countenance anything other than financially advantageous relationships with women. Brecht’s point is much the same as with the hiring men but he has to make it using a cast appropriately gendered for the conventions of his age.

Now when Mina turns Mr to Mrs Puntila, there remains an issue. Will she maintain the gender distribution of the cast between those bought in illusion as workers and those bought in romantic delusion as sex-slaves and wives. Will the gender of the Telephonist and other Lammi women be changed. If so will there descriptions of the essential double drudgery of women under capitalist human relations (‘boiling potatoes’ and so on) be changed. And how?

I feel I can only reach this level of interest in the play as I see it in March after beginning to know the potentials of the play. Much that is very interesting will be done. My expectations are high. Mrs Puntila is played by the wondrous actress Elaine C. Smith, whose grasp of tragi-comic potential is second to none. The play has a great social change director of plays who targeted the proto-fascist Erdogan in his native Turkey, Murat Daltaban ( https://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/16295820.in-the-shadow-of-erdogan-interview-with-turkish-theatre-director-murat-daltaban/).

Now this production will have much to show us that a concern with original text will not alone make available. But to research the ways and means of older versions is for me a way of heightening the access to seeing great artists at work as teams and individuals. The Lyceum is good at this.

So I’ll be back after March.