A quick post today, just to share a few collected video resources about Bertolt Brecht and his theatre.

The first set is from a BBC documentary made 25 years ago, but still a useful source of all things Brechtian. Sadly the whole documentary is no longer available. The final fourth clip is from the same documentary, but from a different source and shows Helene Weigel (Brecht’s second wife and acclaimed actresses of the period) explaining Epic theatre.

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The second set come from the National Theatre in the UK and were filmed when they were mounting a production of Brecht’s Mother Courage:

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The next is an interesting and eclectic small film called The Brecht Document which details Brecht’s and is composed of what its writer/director Warren Leming calls “fragments” from a two-year stay in Berlin,Germany which he made in 1986/87. The final couple of minutes are from The Jewish Wife (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich), one of Brecht’s most haunting texts.

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This one is Eric Bentley, the eminent critic, playwright and translator on the life of – and his work with – the legendary Brecht.

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And finally, and perhaps most extraordinarily, a recording of Brecht’s testimony to, and questioning by, the House Com­mit­tee on Un-​Ame­ri­can Ac­tivi­tes (The McCarthy witch hunts), hours before he returned to Germany.

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