The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a play within a play. Two local communes argue over ownership of land by putting on a play for a boyish UN official. The parable within the play debates the rights and wrongs of ownership and asks who should inherit. Being Brecht, the odds are stacked against the privileged, and the parable ups the ante when instead of land what is at stake is: who is the mother of the governor’s child?
      The immaturity of the UN bureaucrat with spectacles and Harry Potter fringe is nicely contrasted with the worn out victims of war. Brilliantly depicted with stuffed rumps and bellies, hustling over the price of milk, Brecht shows us a pared down world of crude human interaction: cynicism, sex and vanity pervades everything. One of this production’s triumphs is its casual topicality: clear references to the horrors of war in Afghanistan and Iraq are articulated by the victims, wearily cataloguing the horror of another wedding party wiped out by an air raid. War will never help them, it’s just economics, and it debases everything. Even language has been rationed; the locals cannot even refer to the war but instead must must call it a ‘conflict.’
      Despite Brecht’s emphasis on the artificiality of the theatrical medium the play is thoroughly engaging as the human drama of the servant girl, Grusha, unfolds. Matti Houghton brings integrity and grit to the role of a woman who rescues the governor’s baby after being abandoned by its mother during a military coup. While the haughty and beplumed Josephine Butler worries about her valuable linen it’s left up to the underdog to show maternal tenderness. Grusha rescues the baby and flees the terrifyingly dissolute soldiers. In a nice twist Nicholas Asbury played both the governor and the Sergeant of the new regime, delighting in rape and violence. Likening his joy of taking orders to sex itself he tells a young recruit that he should get a ‘hard-on’ every time he’s ordered to do anything.
      James Clyde was excellent both at the newly installed Juge Azdak and the louche long-haired leather-coated singer who led the band, summarizing the play’s themes before each new event. He came on like Scott Walker in the first act, with a voice full of melodrama and late nights before developing a low Delta blues growl as Grusha’s sufferings increased. Azdak finally decides on the ownership of the child in a judgement that references a Chinese fable and the Judgement of Solomon, neatly reversing each of them. The child in the middle was an extraordinarily expressive puppet with striped pullover and frayed cuffs.
      Brecht claimed he wanted to engage in a debate of ideas, the audience’s emotional reaction was secondary to the polemic—yet with these stated aims he would have trouble with a modern audience. How many of today’s liberal intelligentsia need converting to Brecht’s views on the tyranny of the ruling classes? Rather his plays have survived because of the human drama which was no more acute than when Grusha carried her baby across a creaking foot bridge and the ropes swayed precariously.
Daniel Jeffreys