The Days of the Commune is aplay by the twentieth-centuryGermandramatistBertolt Brecht. It dramatises the rise and fall of theParis Commune in 1871. The play is an adaptation of the 1937 playThe Defeat by the Norwegian poet and dramatistNordahl Grieg.[1] Brecht's collaboratorMargarete Steffin translated the play into German in 1938 and Brecht began working on his adaptation in 1947. The process was driven by another Brecht collaborator,Ruth Berlau, who had introduced Brecht to Grieg in 1931.
The work forgoes the individual dramatichero and focuses on theParis Commune itself, a collective composite of people. The scenes shift between the different lives of people, going from the street corners ofMontmartre to theParis City Council. On this council, the enemies of the Commune,Thiers andBismarck, engineer its collapse.
The play details an event that is considered to be the originalproletarian revolution and a major event in thesocialist revolution.Karl Marx viewed the Commune - which remained the only attempt at a decidedlysocialist government during his lifetime - as the prelude of a classlesscommunist society. Brecht's play develops aLeninist interpretation of the Commune[citation needed].
It is one of the main sources for the first act ofLuigi Nono's operaAl gran sole carico d'amore.
It was performed on the 100th anniversary of the Paris Commune, in March 1971, in two performances at Harvard University and at Yale University under the direction of Leonard Lehrman.
A version directed byZoe Beloff was performed on the streets of New York over the course of several months in 2012, and a film version can be seen on its website.[2]
Authority control databases: National |
|---|
 | This article on a play from the 1940s is astub. You can help Wikipedia byexpanding it. |
