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'Drums In The Night'.
 A soldier goes off to war; his girl Anna and her family stay behind in Berlin. Her family are war profiteers. The thought of Anna (played by Ksenga Logos) is what keeps the soldier (Rory Walker) going through the horrors of the First World War, yet when he returns home after four years away he finds he has returned on the very day she gets engaged to Merc, a capitalist who stayed at home profiting from the misery.
It's almost impossible these days to think of Germany's Weimar Republic without also thinking of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, his regime which supplanted the Weimar and plunged Germany into another orgy of warfare.
This is the period in which Brecht wrote, and it is by chance rather than design that his principal protagonist is a returned soldier from the western Front, very like a certain Austrian private who was soon to make his mark as the leader of the disaffected and the militarists of Germany.
Says actor Jacqy Phillips, who plays the part of the mother Amalie Balicke in Brink Theatre's adaptation, "On one level it's about love finding itself again, but on a much deeper level it's about a man having to decide. Whether to become a revolutionary and changing things in his country, or going to bed.
"I think Brecht wants the audience to feel that conflict between comfort and youthful idealism, and fighting for something you believe in."
With Director Chris Drummond, 'Drums In The Night' will be staged in a cabaret setting. "It's going to be an extraordinarily dramatic piece of theatre," allows Brink member Michaela Cantwell, who plays a slovenly maid. "I feel it will reflect the style of performance that Brecht was looking for."
With a contemporary translation from the original German by Finegan Kruckmeyer, the two feel something extra has been gained for the performance.
'Drums In The Night' is a very early Brecht work, written in about 1921 but referring to the events of 1918 and immediately following the Armistice.
"In those early times Berlin was a pretty horrible place to be, when the Spartacist Revolution was happening,because Brecht was actually on the battlefield - he was a medic as a very young man and he was moved by the sense of revolution amongst the soldiers," explains Phillips. "When he went to Berlin there was none of that there, there was just a dull apathy."
In a way Brecht is turning conventional notions of warfare on its head: his sense of hope and of change came from the battlefield, not from the grind of daily life in peacetime in a defeated nation's capitol. He was hardly a man of warlike thoughts however. Writing in what became acknowledged as his 'socialist' phase, Brecht's hope was that the soldiery had become so disenchanted with the horror of being lead to war by the politicians that they would seek an alternative, by socialist revolution if needs be. This was the basis for the ill-fated Spartacist revolution in Germany. Of course, by then the Russian people had followed that exact path, so Brecht had a close-to-home model to study.
In the characters that Brecht sets up for 'Drums In The Night' the author introduces class struggle through the obscenely rich, fat capitalists who stayed at home and profited from the war through their industry. And yet his hero, when faced with choice, is revealed as a man with feet of clay.
"He was really disappointed that the bourgeois loved it ['Drums...'] and that they didn't understand he was trying to make them see themselves," Phillips remarks forcefully.
At one point I accuse Phillips of being a 'hopeless romantic' herself and she smiles gleefully. A commissioned work (ie Brecht was paid to write it), its success, as Michaela Cantwell explains, further depressed the playwright.
"It ended up being hugely successful and making lots of money, which was not really his plan at all."
The success of his failure was a blow which dogged Brecht for the rest of his life.
So much for Brecht: I ask what seemed to me an importantly earnest question. Why do we need to be reminded of a play from 85 years ago, and what messages does it hold for us in the 21st century? Are there parallels such that 'Drums...' remains an important piece of theatre for our time? Okay, two questions.
"The connection seems to be to me about the choices you make," suggests Phillips, following up, "My feeling is that out there is potential revolution and change, to stop America, and to do some things right. Here our potential for revolution is blanketed by our apathy, and we can keep voting Howard back in, and Blair back in..."
Alex Wheaton
 | Brink Productions in association with State Theatre present 'Drums In The Night', now performing in The Space until April 16. |
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