Baal

Baal holds the type of mesmerizing brilliance you’d expect from Bertolt Brecht, minus the morals. In fact it’s anything but moralistic, which is why contemporary audiences can watch the drama unfolding on the stage and relate it to the real and ongoing world in a new adaptation, which is presented by Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company.

The first of Brecht’s plays differs from his later work that established him as one of the greatest play rights on the planet. If anything, it leads into and is the natural predecessor of the plays that fit into Brecht’s non-Aristotelian theatre. In 1918, when Baal was written, Brecht was a young medical student at Munich University. He had sought a loophole in being drafted to fight in WWI by enrolling to study, where he also took a theatre class held by Arthur Kutscher. It was after an argument in one of Kutscher’s seminars that Brecht responded by writing Baal. This trend of counter-creativity would feature throughout Brecht’s career; both in rewriting and revisiting his own work, as well as adaptations, and producing work in response to other contemporaries’ work.

Baal is the story of a young ruffian, hell-bent on destroying relationships with people he knows and doesn’t know alike, self-destructive and with an anarchistic approach to sex, debauchery, and life. At the time of its first production in 1923 Baal did not represent a typical dramatic play. Later Brecht would deploy techniques for prioritizing function in what was first known as Epic theatre and later under Brecht’s preferred term Dialectical theatre. Techniques included summarizing scenes before they were acted or incorporating songs or comedy. This helped to intentionally remove the audience from the types of viewing pleasures popularized at the time by Stanislavski’s system, which focussed on absorbing the audience in the play. Brecht considered this an intended illusion that created escapism. In taking theatre to new social boundaries and in order to create social and political awareness, Brechtian theatre became collective experimental works practising fragmented and contrasting methods to remove audiences and act as a reminder that they were indeed watching a play.

Baal may not be moralizing or political in the sense of Brecht’s later work, but its hero is an anti-hero: anti-establishment, anti-bourgeois, and yet romanticised for it. The play is strongly influenced by the Romantic period or Sturm und Drang (Storm and Urge) in Germany, which was a period that focussed on free expression in emotions, and was against the political and social constraints following the Enlightenment. However the emotions that Baal experiences are not just emotions, they are acted upon in the forms of sex and murder and celebrated through their romanticizing. These shocking acts distance the audience, and in that way mould the same affects that followed in Brechtian theatre. Baal is also political in its anti-establishment aesthetic, and it’s easy to understand why Brecht would later follow Marxism and flee Europe in an attempt to escape Nazi Germany and WWII.

Brecht’s first play differs from his later work not just in content but also through both music and the representation of the anti-hero. In the new adaptation showing at Malthouse Theatre, there has been revival and reworking. Composer and Sound Designer of Baal, Stefan Gregory ( Thyestes, The Wild Duck) says, “A lot of work has been done with the text we have, rearranging scenes and stripping back the language and interpreting what certain lines mean and how they can be staged to tell a good story and attempt to work theatrically. There’s been a lot of detailing work done.”

Despite a collaborative history between Gregory and wunderkind director Simon Stone (found of The Hayloft Project), this is the first time Gregory has written songs for one of Stone’s plays. Stone and Tom Wright (Optimism, Women of Troy) translated the script and lyrics and Gregory and Stone worked on refining the music. “I’ve moved away from the German Cabaret style of music that we normally associate with Brecht and we have an opportunity in this piece as opposed to some of Brecht’s other pieces to make the music part of the world of the play… we’re lucky because the story is about a poet or a songwriter or a rockstar, and the songs sit inside the world because the character writes the songs in the story,” says Gregory. Baal is the hero of our time, as so often in popularized culture it is the anti-hero that is favoured above the classical hero. Look at Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Holden Caulfield in Catcher In The Rye, and Dexter Morgan in Jeff Lindsay’s series Dexter – this is nothing new and if anything the anti-hero is an old establishment. Yet there is nothing old about Baal, which is aided under Stone’s adaptation and direction. He has produced, directed, adapted and acted (Jindabyne, Kokoda, Balibo) his way to recognition, awards and the position of resident director at Belvoir in Sydney. Such a strong guidance may leave the audience effortlessly under the spell of Baal and without a chance to maintain moral outrage, taking the play to new boundaries, just as Brecht always hoped to do with his own adaptations and reworkings.

Baal is also a poet and songwriter, and the contemporary music adapted tofit Baal intentionally reflects this. “I’ve tried to make it a bit more like pop songs or contemporary songwriting so that we believe they are songs he has actually written,” Gregory explains. He has worked around Brecht’s loose musical intentions in the new adaptation. “This is the first play he wrote so there’s songs in it but they weren’t scored by anyone, there are loose melodies that are intended for them but I have totally ignored those in my rendering of them,” he elaborates.

All of the music is performed by the character of Baal, played by Thomas M Wright (actor, director and co-founder of Black Lung), who sings the songs on electric guitar. Yet as Gregory says, ‘these are not just strumming along songs.’ Their accompaniment variations along with acting, costumes and lighting create a world that is vital in adapting the script for today’s audience. “Whenever you adapt a play, particularly when you direct or produce a play, if you’re doing it right you’re doing it for today’s audience always. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re setting it in a particular point in time, but the world that you create on stage has to be recognisable and resonate with your audience. You’re making theatre for the people around you not anyone else,” Gregory explains.

It is an eternally modern tale, perhaps more relevant and known now in what sometimes seems like an incessantly moral free society, idolising the ‘live fast, die young’ mantra. Baal remains not just an introduction to Brecht’s later work that would go on to create Epic theatre, but also as Brecht’s first creation by a youth about a youth, and as the disclaimer reads: ‘this production contains adult themes, nudity, violence, simulated sex scenes, drug references and very coarse language. Frankly, Baal is a hazard in and of itself…”

Baal is playing at The Malthouse Theatre from Saturday April 2 to Saturday April 23. Tickets vary from $21 – $55. For more information see malthousetheatre.com.au