According to the play by Bertolt Brecht
Translation: Alexander FILIPPOV-CHEKHOV | with the support of the Goethe-Institut in Moscow
Director: Ivan KOMAROV
This cast is an independent theater company that grew up from the Khudruk Workshop of CIM Viktor Ryzhakov in the Moscow Art Theater School (9th studio of the Moscow Art Theater). Released in the summer of 2016, the team decided not to part and create its own theater.
From the Meyerhold website:
The play "Baal" was written in 1918 by a young Brecht-sanitar at the front. At the same time, Brecht the poet liked to read antisocial poems in the taverns and protested against the false and obsolete poems.
In ancient mythology, Baal is one of the first gods, the god of sunlight, the creator of the world, etc. And in the play of Brecht Baal is a talented poet, imitating Arthur Rimbaud, the burner of life, descending to its very bottom: an alcoholic, a womanizer, a murderer. He neglects social laws, his goal is independence.
The production team wanted to make tragicfares and explore the time when the play was written, the early poems and Brecht's prose. The First World War ended. The avant-garde currents of the 20th century were born. Dadaists consistently destroyed any aesthetics. Futurists propagated the pathos of destruction. Expressionists were inspired by a tragic worldview.
This is an attempt to understand whether a hero like Baal could be created and needed in 2018, whether the freedom of the price paid for it by freedom-loving people is worth it.
Specifically for "Julyansambl" the new translation of the play was made by Alexander FILIPPOV-CHEKHOV (with the support of the Goethe Institute in Moscow): " Brecht left four versions of the" Baal ". His first play he rewrote his whole life! The existing Russian translation does not reflect the early poetics of Brecht and does not correspond to any of these versions. There were also reductions, probably censorship of clearly religious moments. The stage fate of Baal in Russia is unenviable, serious work with the text, in my opinion, was not . "
Plot Synopsis:
The story charts the decline of a drunken and dissolute poet, Baal. Baal is an anti-hero who rejects the conventions and trappings of bourgeois society. This situation draws on the German Sturm und Drang tradition, which celebrates the cult of the genius living outside the conventions of society that would later destroy him. "The outcast, the disillusioned tough becomes the hero; he may be criminal, he may be semi-human," argues John Willett, "but in plays like Baal he can be romanticized into an inverted idealist, blindly striking out at the society in which he lives."[3] Baal roams the countryside, womanizing and brawling. He seduces Johanna, who subsequently drowns herself. He spurns his pregnant mistress Sophie and abandons her. He murders his friend Ekart, becoming a fugitive from the police. Defiantly aloof from the consequences of his actions, Baal is nonetheless brought low by his debauchery, dying alone in a forest hut, hunted and deserted, and leaving in his wake the corpses of deflowered maidens and murdered friends.