Notes from London

If one wants to be jolted out of one’s usual, comfortable way of seeing art, then Raven Row’s recent exhibition will confound, unsettle, and do the job.

In this luxuriously unusual show, brecht:fragments shares rare excerpts from the Berlin archives of avant-garde dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht, alongside twice daily live performances of his experimental plays from 1924 to 1931. 

Born in Germany in 1898, Brecht experienced the societal upheavals of World War I and II. He fled the Nazis after the Reichstag burnt down, living in exile in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland before traveling via Russia, to California. He ended his final years in the German Democratic Republic, his work feted in Paris and London, more than the GDR.

An artist-intellectual who wrote poems daily, Brecht sought to combine through his Epic Theatre, both Marxist politics, and culture, using the art of theatre entertainment as a Trojan horse to provoke and engage public audiences into thinking about deeper societal issues and inequalities. His goal was to ‘make the familiar strange’ (Verfremdung) to disrupt the viewer’s passive, consuming relationship towards what they saw, into one of critical inquiry and new ideas.

Raven Row presents in glass cases and on walls, fragments of Brecht's newspaper collages, notes, and photographs that reveal the obsessive methodology behind his work. Photos of a fierce, proud head-scarfed young folk woman, are alongside Renee Falconetti as Jean of Arc, a child asleep on the father’s shoulder, mugshots of murderers, Hitler’s physical stances, or a lavish illustration from the epic 16th c Persian Shahnama (Book of Kings). All were meticulously pasted by Brecht onto paper sheets to record gestures, body language, and faces as sources of inspiration. Brecht utilised physical actions, rather than just words alone, to communicate his ideas.