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Sinhalese translation of the play 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui' by German playwright Bertolt Brecht

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Lecture on 'Methods of Brechtian Theatre'


The new production of the play Yakshagamanaya commenced on 06th November 2011 at the TrikonE Cultural Foundation. A selected group of about 100 was present for the event. Two lectures were given by Dr. Micheal Fernando and Dr. Sunil Wijesiriwardene, translator of the script as an introduction to the play.


After these lectures a discussion was held and other Sri Lankan dramatists such as Mr. Parakrama Niriella  were present for this discussion.

A series of lectures followed by several theatre workshops will be held before finalizing the cast of the play. The participants were very enthusiastic about the lectures as they were given a thorough knowledge about the history, script and methods of acting through these lectures.

Dharmasiri Bandaranayake



Dharmasiri Bandaranayake is an award winning Sri Lankan dramatist and film director. As an acclaimed dramatist, his plays the best that Sri Lankan theatre has seen. Eka-Adhipathi (The Dictator), Makarakshaya (The Dragon), Dhawala Bheeshana (Men without Shadows),Yakshagamanaya (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), and Trojan Kanthawo (Trojan Women) have all dealt with current issues of national and political importance. He is an artist who attempts to connect the socio-political environment with the civil society through art.

As a film director, Bandaranayake’s debut film, Hansa Vilak (Swan Lake) in 1980 dealt with facets of a society at odds with itself. His other films like Thunweni Yamaya (Third part of the night – 1983),Suddilage Kathawa (Woman in a whirlpool – 1984), Bavaduka and Bawakarma (The sorrow of existence part 1 & 2 – 1997) followed similar themes. Mr. Bandaranayake is the founder and the chief executive officer of the TrikonE Cultural Foundation. 

1994 production of Yakshagamanaya
Yakshagamanaya was first produced in year 1994 by Mr. Dharmasiri Bandaranayake. The translation was done by Mr. Sunil Wijesiriwardene, a well known theatre director and scholar in Sri Lanka. The production received a huge acknowledgment from both the public and theatre critics and was staged 87 times in various parts of the country. The play participated in the State Drama Festival 1994 and won 10 awards including best director of the year and the best production of the year.

Re-production of this play started in November 2011 and will be staged in year 2012. Mr. Bandaranayake expects to experiment in new theatrical aspects and use physical theatre to bring out the theme of the play. 

About the play


The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (original German title: Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui) is a play by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, originally written in 1941. It chronicles the rise of Arturo Ui, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the opposition.

It was written by Brecht in only three weeks in 1941 whilst in exile in Helsinki, Finland awaiting a visa to enter the US. The play was not produced on the stage until as late as 1958, and not until 1961 in English. In spite of this, Brecht never envisioned a version of the play in Germany, intending it for the American stage all along.

The play is consciously a highly satirical allegory of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, whose rise Brecht represented in parallel to that of Ui. All the characters and groups in the play had direct counterparts in real life, with Ui representing Hitler, his henchman Ernesto Roma representing Ernst Röhm, Dogsborough representing Paul von Hindenburg (a pun on the GermanHund and Burg), Emanuele Giri representing Hermann Göring, the Cauliflower Trust representing the Prussian Junkers, the fate of the town of Cicero standing for the Anschluss in Austria and so on. In addition, every scene in the play is based on a real event, for example the warehouse fire which represented the fire at the Reichstag, or the Dock Aid Scandal which represented the Osthilfeskandal (East Aid) scandal. The play is similar to the film The Great Dictator (1940), which also featured an absurd parody of Hitler by Charlie Chaplin.

Dramatically it is in keeping with Brecht's Epic style of theatre. It opens with a prologue written in the form of a direct address to the audience outlining all the major characters and explaining the basis of the upcoming plot, allowing the audience to better focus on the message than the suspense of what may happen next. It also describes in its stage directions the prominence that technical aspects of theatre should play in a production, most notably in the use of signs or projections appearing after certain scenes which present the audience with relevant information about Hitler's own rise to power, in order to clarify the parallels. The play also uses frequent references to Shakespeare and other writers to further its didactic messages. To highlight his evil and villainous rise to power, Ui is compared to Shakespeare's Richard III and Macbeth in both the introductory prologue and in scene 14 when he experiences similar visitations from the ghosts of his victims as Richard and Macbeth do; while Hitler's own learned prowess at public speaking is referenced by Ui receiving lessons from an actor which include him reciting Mark Antony's famous speech from Julius Caesar.

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, (about 50 miles (80 km) north-west of Munich) to a conventionally-devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father (who had been persuaded to have a Protestant wedding). His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would impact on his writing throughout his life. From her, too, came the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama. Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied. At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a lifelong creative partnership, Neher designing many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helping to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre.
When he was 16, the First World War broke out; initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates "swallowed by the army". On his father's recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for an additional medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917. There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star Wedekind.
From July 1916, Brecht's newspaper articles began appearing under the new name "Bert Brecht" (his first theatre criticism for the Augsburger Volkswille appeared in October 1919). Brecht was drafted into military service in the autumn of 1918, only to be posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military VD clinic; the war ended a month later.
In July 1919, Brecht and Paula Banholzer (who had begun a relationship in 1917) had a son, Frank. In 1920 Brecht's mother died.
Some time in either 1920 or 1921, Brecht took a small part in the political cabaret of the Munich comedian Karl Valentin. Brecht's diaries for the next few years record numerous visits to see Valentin perform. Brecht compared Valentin to Chaplin, for his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology"  Writing in his Messingkauf Dialogues years later, Brecht identified Valentin, along with Wedekind and Büchner, as his "chief influences" at that time:

But the man he [Brecht writes of himself in the third person] learnt most from was the clown Valentin, who performed in a beer-hall. He did short sketches in which he played refractory employees, orchestral musicians or photographers, who hated their employer and made him look ridiculous. The employer was played by his partner, a popular woman comedian who used to pad herself out and speak in a deep bass voice.
Brecht's first full-length play, Baal (written 1918), arose in response to an argument in one of Kutscher's drama seminars, initiating a trend that persisted throughout his career of creative activity that was generated by a desire to counter another work (both others' and his own, as his many adaptations and re-writes attest). "Anyone can be creative," he quipped, "it's rewriting other people that's a challenge." Brecht completed his second major play, Drums in the Night, in February 1919.
In 1922 while still living in Munich, Brecht came to the attention of an influential Berlin critic, Herbert Ihering: "At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight"—he enthused in his review of Brecht's first play to be produced, Drums in the Night—"[he] has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision. It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear and your spinal column." In November it was announced that Brecht had been awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize (intended for un-established writers and probably Germany's most significant literary award, until it was abolished in 1932) for his first three plays (Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle, although at that point only Drums had been produced). The citation for the award insisted that:


"Brecht's language is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round."
That year he married the Viennese opera-singer Marianne Zoff. Their daughter—Hanne Hiob (1923–2009)—was a successful German actress.
In 1923, Brecht wrote a scenario for what was to become a short slapstick film, Mysteries of a Barbershop, directed by Erich Engel and starring Karl Valentin. Despite a lack of success at the time, its experimental inventiveness and the subsequent success of many of its contributors have meant that it is now considered one of the most important films in German film history. In May of that year, Brecht's In the Jungle premiered in Munich, also directed by Engel. Opening night proved to be a "scandal"—a phenomenon that would characterize many of his later productions during the Weimar Republic—in which Nazis blew whistles and threw stink bombs at the actors on the stage.
In 1924 Brecht worked with the novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger (whom he had met in 1919) on an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II that proved to be a milestone in Brecht's early theatrical and dramaturgical development. Brecht's Edward II constituted his first attempt at collaborative writing and was the first of many classic texts he was to adapt. As his first solo directorial début, he later credited it as the germ of his conception of 'epic theatre'. That September, a job as assistant dramaturg at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater—at the time one of the leading three or four theatres in the world—brought him to Berlin.