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Baal was the first full-length play written by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht.[1] It concerns a wastrel youth who becomes involved in several sexual affairs and at least one murder. It was written in 1918, when Brecht was a 20-year-old student at Munich University, in response to the expressionist drama The Loner(Der Einsame) by the soon-to-become-Nazi dramatist Hanns Johst.[2]The play is written in a form of heightened prose and includes four songs and an introductory choral hymn ("Hymn of Baal the Great"), set to melodies composed by Brecht himself.[1] Brecht wrote it prior to developing the dramaturgical techniques of epic theatre that characterize his later work, although he did re-work the play in 1926.


Plot synopsis

The story charts the decline of adrunken 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 Drangtradition, 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 JohnWillett, "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 theconsequences 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.


Production history

Despite being written in 1918, Baal did not receive a theatrical performance until 1923, when it opened on 8 December at the Altes Theater in Leipzig (in a productiondirected by Alwin Kronacher in which Brecht participated for most rehearsals).[4]

Brecht wrote a revised version with Elisabeth Hauptmann in 1926 for a brief production at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where he had worked recently as a dramaturg. It opened on the 14 February for a single matinée performance. It was performed by the Junge Bühne and directed by Brecht and OskarHomolka (who also played the title role), with set-design by Caspar Neher.[5]

In 1982, musician/actor David Bowie played the title role for a BBC television production of Baal. John Willett provided the English translation and screenplay. Bowie's recordings of the play's five songs were released as an EP, David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's BAAL.


THEATER REVIEW; Finding the Beats in Brecht, In aDifferent Time and Place

By WILBORN HAMPTON 
Published: August 12, 2000, Saturday
A long, long time ago, before the triangle below Canal Street became TriBeCa and when a coffee house was something very different from Starbucks, young men and women in black turtlenecks and berets used to gather in downtown basements and bars to smoke foul cigarettes and listen to jazz and poetry, some bad andsome not so bad, and see experimental plays. It was the milieu that produced, for better or worse, the Beat generation, progressive jazz and later, Sam Shepard.
In a raw and raucous production of Bertolt Brecht's ''Baal,'' Jim Simpson and his fledgling Bat Theater Company recapture the spirit and excitement of that old after-hours avant-garde. Performed in the downstairs space of the Flea Theateron a bare, black box of a set, with a jazz trio on the side and a 10 p.m. starting time, the show rekindles a sense of adventure that is too often missing in today's theater. The Beats go on. Well, except for the no smoking signs.
''Baal'' was Brecht's first play (although not the first produced), and it is infused with all the youthful passion and anger of a beginning playwright. With a title...