ABSTRACT
Between September 1922 and March 1924, Bertolt Brecht worked in Munich on the original productions of three of his four plays, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle (later called Jungle and finally, In the Jungle of Cities), and Edward II. During this brief span of a year and a half, Brecht also made a short film, Mysteries of a Barber Shop, with many of the same actors from the three play productions. Unlike Brecht’s later theatre work, which is thoroughly documented with many photographs and extensive production notes, these earliest productions remain relatively obscure. In an attempt to add to the information we do have, interviews were conducted with the three surviving actors in those first productions of Brecht’s work: Hans Schweikart, who played a significant supporting role in Edward II; Blandine Ebinger, who played the comic-romantic lead in Mysteries of a Barber Shop (as well as several leading roles in other Brecht productions outside of Munich), and Erwin Faber, whose portrayals of lead roles in each of the four productions forms a veritable through-line of Brecht’s professional work in his Munich years. Since the subject of the interviews was
some fifty years past, many of the details of the productions had been forgotten; yet the amount of information recalled by these actors is probably due to the fact that all three still actively participate in theatre production today. (Information in the following conversations has been extracted from as many as three different interviews over a period of up to a year.)
I. DRUMS IN THE NIGHT
By the time that Otto Falckenberg began to cast Drums in the Night in late spring of 1922, the Kammerspiele (literally: the “chamber plays”) was internationally reknowned for its many avant-garde productions and was well suited for the naturalistic-expressionistic character of Brecht’s “comedy.” On their intimate stage of “barely twenty-five feet in width and no depth” the Kammerspiele had premiered plays by the naturalists Hauptmann and Ibsen as well as by the expressionists Wedekind, Strindberg and Kaiser. Falckenberg had firmly established his reputation as the “matrix of Munich expressionism” with his productions of Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata (1 May 1915) and Kaiser’s From Morning till Midnight (28 April 1917). As artistic director of the Kammerspiele from 1917 on, he had gathered an ensemble of young actors who could perform his productions. The casting of Drums in the Night reflected the “Falckenberg style” in the variety of extreme character types and the robustness of the lead actor, Erwin Faber. Although Faber had been “discovered” by Falckenberg and had joined the Kammerspiele in 1916 to act in many of Falckenberg’s productions, in 1920 he became the leading actor at the National Theatre and had to be “borrowed” to play the role of Andreas Kragler in Drums in the Night. (Faber was still acting with the National Theatre at the age of 86.)
McDOWELL: My first questions concern Drums in the Night… FABER: That premiered in September of 1922. MCDOWELL: How did you come to be cast in the role of Andreas Kragler? FABER: Brecht was then dramaturg at the Kammerspiele and requested
that I play the lead in Drums in the Night…so F alckenberg in turn asked the director of the National Theatre (Carl Zeiss) who released me for the production.
