ABSTRACT
The Berliner Ensemble’s 1954 staging of The Caucasian Chalk Circle in East Berlin was a spectacular embodiment of Brecht’s passion for collective creativity. One of the last productions of his own work that Brecht undertook, it vividly demonstrated what had become his trademarks, especially his Marxist approach to text and mise-en-scène. Like all his stagings it was characterized both by the consolidation of earlier innovations and by new departures that marked his receptiveness to the immediate political context and love of artistic experimentation. Not only did the production continue his technique of expressing contradictory reality by combining divergent modes of performance, but it also ushered in a new experiment with mixed genre. The Chalk Circle is an intriguingly hybrid form, bringing together Brecht’s established practice of satirizing class-based society with what for him was the relatively unfamiliar strategy of modifying ‘happy ending’ traditions in order to celebrate the pathway to a just and communitarian society.
