ABSTRACT
In keeping with Brecht’s aesthetic policy of adapting world dramatic classics for his Epic Theatre, the Berliner Ensemble used its collaborative adaptation of Molière’s Dom Juan to inaugurate its permanent home, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, in March, 1954. Like the other post-1950 adaptations meant for the permanent repertory of this new theatre company, the reworked Molière comedy exhibits Brecht’s theoretical and practical theatre aims, particularly in its performance potential as a recognizably Molièresque comedy rooted in commedia dell’arte style and also as a Brechtian comedy defined by the gestical thrust of “the socially comic” (das gesellschaftlich komische). In addition to rescuing Molière’s socially satirical Don Juan from subsequent theatrical tradition’s romantic heroizing of him, the Brechtian version redefines the charming social parasite as both a ridiculous egoist and an example of a dangerously attractive, theatrically mythic personality type. In this, the Brechtian version recovers an essential thrust of Molière’s comic intention.
