Bertolt Brecht - Education Scotland

2
INTRODUCTION
of Brecht around like a team of FBI agents and I have tried to take this into
account when compiling this bibliography.
For ease, I have tended to focus primarily on the translations of John Willett and/
or Ralph Manheim who publish largely through Methuen in the United Kingdom.
Some Brecht fans will prefer the Eric Bentley translations but these are published
generally in the USA by the Grove Press and consequently are not as readily
available. Other translations do appear in this bibliography, where and when I
have considered them beneficial. As for spellings, where a writer makes reference
to a play, the writer’s spelling has been used (Bentley : Setzuan; Boa : Sezuan;
Hofman : Sichuan; Willett : Szechwan, etc.).
Due to the enormous number of books written on the subject, there has been an
urgent and genuine need for the trimming and paring down of a bibliography
such as this. Unit 2: Twentieth-Century Theatre: Theories of Performance (AH) is
a 40-hour course within which teachers and students will have to look at two
practitioners. It is perfectly conceivable, therefore, that teachers will be looking
at the need for resources to suit a 20-hour teaching and learning pack for half of
the whole unit.
In a bid to solve this problem, I have identified what I consider to be the Top
Ten titles – critical texts from which all the suggested course content is
accessible, save for actual play texts themselves.
What follows this section is a selection of Brecht’s work in translation. Plays,
poems and theoretical writings are included but there has been no attempt to
provide details of all the work in translation. Plays have not been identified in
The Top Ten due to the overwhelming number of critical works.
Plays, along with other of Brecht’s own creative output, form a separate choice
for students studying Unit 2. Unit 3: Special Study gives the student the option of
looking at The Good Woman of Setzuan, though any of Brecht’s plays may be used
for practical exploration in Unit 2. I felt this was all the more reason for keeping
plays in a separate section of the bibliography.
The World Wide Web is also a resource which cannot be ignored today. All the
usual warnings about its unreliability, the cost of calls and connection are, of
course, pertinent. However, for all the rubbish that you will dig up, there are
also little nuggets with much that is relevant and interesting and demanding
placed on various websites all over the world and I have included those that I
think would aid teachers and students alike.
Music played a vital role in Brecht’s work, and the two CDs mentioned at the tail
end of this section are merely an example of those easily available. For further
DRAMA