Lynda Rooke as a Salvation Army girl is pleased to have made a convert to 'spiritual' values in Theresa Streatfeild as the Widow Queck in the Avon Touring Company production of Bertolt Brecht's The Breadshop (Photo: ADRIAN LOVELESS) Bertolt Brecht's short play The Breadshop, written in the 1930s, had never been performed in Britain before until this current production by the Avon Touring Company. And a moving, skilful production it is. On the surface it is a simple tale of the poor and unemployed in the depression in Germany, but it brings to light many of the forces, fears and attitudes which were to play a crucial role in the impending fascist victory.
Through a study of the descending fortunes of Widow Queck (played with suitable gloom by Theresa Streatfeild) and her five children, we encounter the harsh reality of what it meant to be unemployed in the '30s with no-one to turn to. As the characters sing at one point, reflecting their fateful future: When giants stagger, those What Brecht portrays so well is the way in which the demoralised poor seek individ ual solutions to their problems when organised politics don't appeal. Everything is reduced to the role of base commodities to be bought, sold or even bartered. And the em: ployed too are affected, becoming corrupt and heartless — we see Ajax, the baker's assistant, exploiting Widow Queck's misery by demanding sexual favours in return for Collective solidarity or action, save for a vague and useless pity for Widow Queck, doesn't exist. Only Mascher, who stones the breadshop on her behalf, offers any resistance - and his individual anger cannot deal with the forces of the state which But not just the poor are put under Brecht's dramatic microscope. Meininger, the breadshop-owner, shows clearly the frantic, amoral desperation of the small propertyowner - trapped between the big banker demanding his mortgage-interest, and the workers demanding bread and shelter. The roots of his later turn to Nazism are there - a brilliant dramatic complement to Trotsky's analytical writings of the time.
This is a savage yet sensitive play, and a brutal indictment of the barbarity of
Eastern curope ACU NCCK