B&B

Prologue


I condemn Brecht the politician who is dead, but salute Brecht the man-of-theatre who will never die



Body

In Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, written and produced in 1945, if you go to the scene where Azdak enters being pulled with a rope round his neck, abused and treated as a dog, you will wonder if this scene was not the stuff Beckett's Pozzo-Lucky entrance scene is made of!

I salute Beckett and Brecht the two men-of-theatre who will never die

"Brothers in battle--a band of one blood", says the anonymous poem Beowulf, and I say that Beckett and Brecht--the irony that their names are close in sound and have the same initial, together with the Beowulf line above having the alliteration of the letter and sound "b" and the name Beowulf itself sharing the same initials of the two men-of-theatre, churns the irony thicker--have a bond of art that brings them together, no matter how we, readers and critics, try to ignore it. Brecht's Mother Courage, written and produced in 1939, closes with the theme of waiting. Mother courage waits for her son to return one day, and we know that her son, like Godot, will not return to her because we saw him being executed. Isn't the theme of Mother Courage awaiting in vain her son who is dead, and her waiting, therefore, being a false pointless and purposeless act, the stuff Beckett made his Waiting for Godot of!