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Poems on the Theatre /
The Great Art of Living Together
Bertolt Brecht
Translated from the German
by John Berger & Anna Bostock
Seven poems & a quintet of afterwords ...
Simon McBurney
Tom Overton
Emily Foister
Mike Dibb
& David Constantine
Edited by Dominic J. Jaeckle
& Gareth Evans
Tenement Press / Yellowjacket 30
978-1-917304-19-1 / 135pp [Approx.] / £15.50.
The Great Art of Living Together
Bertolt Brecht
Translated from the German
by John Berger & Anna Bostock
Seven poems & a quintet of afterwords ...
Simon McBurney
Tom Overton
Emily Foister
Mike Dibb
& David Constantine
Edited by Dominic J. Jaeckle
& Gareth Evans
Tenement Press / Yellowjacket 30
978-1-917304-19-1 / 135pp [Approx.] / £15.50.
PREOrder direct from Tenement here.
(Forthcoming, 30.10.26)
A publication to commemorate
John Berger’s centenary.
These seven poems have been taken from a longer prose work by Bertolt Brecht called Messingkauf.* We have translated these poems by themselves because they struck us as being immediately useful. They explain—far more clearly than most commentators have done—many of Brecht’s theories about the theatre.
—Berger & Bostock, 1961.
—Berger & Bostock, 1961.
Bonnieux, France, 1970. Katya Berger, © 2026.
Actors
you who perform plays in great houses
under false suns and before silent faces
look sometimes at
the theatre whose stage is the street.
The everyday theatre
common, unrewarded with honour,
but of this earth, living,
made from the traffic of men together.
The theatre whose stage is the street.
[...]
From Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Über alltägliches theater’ /
‘On the everyday theatre’ [Verse One].
(& as read by actor, Stephen Dillane.)
* * *
* The Messingkauf shows us Brecht at his modernist best, dialogic, dialectic, a self-conscious collage of material, mixing genres and modes, probably always intended to be open and fragmentary in form. More interesting, in many ways, than the Short Organum, in which he tried to streamline his theoretical concerns and theatre experience into seventy-seven numbered paragraphs. The themes and preoccupations of the Messingkauf are many. Brecht is concerned to set up a rational, practical alternative to the high-priestly nonsense, as he sees it, of illusion, empathy and Stanislavskian theatre. We get something of a history of the modern theatre, from Brecht’s point of view, and an introduction to the notions of Verfremdung, gestus and so on. Above all, the interest is, as one would expect from Brecht, in how to engage with reality in the theatre, how to make the theatre both a site of sociological experiment and instruction, and at the same time a place of entertainment.
The title of the project is a guiding metaphor in all of this. Messingkauf means the ‘purchase of brass’ [Messing = brass / Kauf = buy, bargain, purchase or deal]. The Philosopher, one of the main discussants in the Messingkauf, comes to the theatre, he says, rather as a scrap-metal dealer might approach a brass band. He is looking for one sort of value in the material of the theatre which the practitioners themselves might assume was rather secondary. The ‘brass’ he wants to deal in are the imitations of social behaviour, which he can project as objects of study; but he has to recognise that the actors and the dramaturge may intend something rather different, namely ‘the construction of emotions,’ or what they would call ‘art.’ But of course they are right too, to an extent at least. Just as the brass band’s musical instruments are not just brass, so the potential of the theatre cannot be exhausted merely as a collection of representations of human interaction.
[...]
Brecht clearly thought of the Messingkauf as an aesthetic and not merely theoretical work (he was never inclined to that sort of separation of theory and practice or of theory and literature). He also wanted it not just to be a text, or series of texts, for reading, but to have the potential for some sort of practical realisation, possibly even for performance, to be einstudierbar, both a theoretical reflection and an experiment and exercise in the capabilities of the theatre. There have indeed been formal theatrical realisations of the work, most notably a 1963 Berliner Ensemble adaptation, in which Brecht’s son-in-law played a Philosopher modelled very much after Brecht himself. The Ensemble played the Messingkauf as if the whole discussion was ‘provoked’ by a theatrically rather overblown version of Hamlet, the last scene of which was performed as a prologue. So critical reflection on the theatre itself became theatre.
—Tom Kuhn
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv,
Fotoarchiv 01/048. Zander & Labisch, © 2026.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century. His works for theatre include Die Dreigroschenoper / The Threepenny Opera (1928) with composer Kurt Weill, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder / Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), Der gute Mensch von Sezuan / The Good Person of Szechwan (1943) and Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui / The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1958), amongst others. Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, and the two world wars directly affected his life and works. He wrote poetry when he was a student but studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After military service during World War I, he abandoned his medical studies to pursue writing and the theater. A member of the Independent Social Democratic Party, Brecht wrote theater criticism for a Socialist newspaper from 1919 to 1921. His plays were banned in Germany in the 1930s and, in 1933, he went into exile, first in Denmark and then Finland. He moved to Santa Monica, California, in 1941, hoping to write for Hollywood, but he drew the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although he managed to deflect their accusations, he moved to Switzerland after the hearings—relocating to East Berlin in 1949—and ran the theatre company the Berliner Ensemble. Poet Michael Hofmann, in an essay titled ‘Singing About the Dark Times: The Poetry of Bertolt Brecht’ for the Liberal, commented that ‘In the course of a mobile, active and engaged life, [Brecht’s] poems were the intelligent, compressed, adaptable and self-contained form for both his private and his public address.’
photographed by Jean Mohr, Ornans, France, early-1970s.
Katya Berger, © 2026.
John Berger (1926-2017)—storyteller, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, dramatist and critic—is one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years. His many books include Ways of Seeing (1972); with photographer Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man (1975); a trilogy of peasant fictions, Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, 1979, Once in Europa, 1987 and Lilac & Flag, 1990); Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984); Photocopies (1996); Here Is Where We Meet (2005); the Booker Prize-winning novel, G (1972); Hold Everything Dear (2007); and the Man Booker-longlisted From A to X (2008).
Anna Bostock / née Anna Zissermann / Anya Berger (1923-2018) was born to Russian / Austrian parents in Manchuria. ‘In different countries, under different names, she shaped the horizons of the English-speaking left on issues of race, gender and class’ [Tom Overton, Frieze]. As Bostock, she was chiefly known for her translations of Trotsky, György Lukács, Wilhelm Reich, Lenin and Marx, though she also produced English language versions of Le Corbusier’s design manual Le Modulor; Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / Return to My Native Land; and texts by Ilya Ehrenburg, Paul Eipper and Ernst Fischer, among others. As Berger, she worked as a translator for the United Nations, and was active in the women's liberation movement, contributing to the BBC and the landmark feminist journal, Spare Rib. Her last translation was of André Leroi-Gourhan’s Le geste et la parole / Gesture and Speech, published in 1993 by the MIT Press.
Katya Berger, © 2026.
You have come here to act plays
but now you are to be asked :
for what purpose?
You have come here to reveal
yourselves in all that you can do
you think this worthy of being watched.
and you hope the people will applaud
as you transport them ·
out of the narrowness of their world
into the largeness of yours,
sharing with you the dizzy peaks
and the tumults of passion.
But now you are to be asked :
for what purpose is this?
[...]
(See here.)
* * *
‘The collaborative nature of [Anya Berger’s] relationship with John was no secret; they once signed a telegram “jonanya.” Although Anya was the linguist, they worked together “officially” on a few translations, most famously Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land (1939, translated 1970). Ways of Seeing (1972), the TV show and subsequent book which made John Berger a household name, drew heavily on Walter Benjamin’s writings on art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Anya, a fluent German speaker, had introduced her husband to Benjamin’s ideas before the Arendt-Zorn translation of Illuminations was published in English in 1968.’
[...]
Emily Foister on Anya Berger / Anna Bostock,
by way of The Paris Review.
(See here.)
* * *
Berger was never far from theatre. Back in 1961 he was translating texts by Bertolt Brecht with his then partner, Anna Bostock / Anya Berger, including Poems on the Theatre. In an essay, ‘The Nature of Mass Demonstrations’ (1968), [...] Berger understands the indeterminate position of the demonstration as ‘a rehearsal’ for the creative ‘performance’ of radical social change, and also as a performance in itself, giving body to an abstraction, representing a potential strength, living as theatre does on the line between the symbolic and real act.
—Exeunt Magazine
It seemed to me that John Berger’s writing could be neatly defined as an attempt to fuse a continentally inflected materialist theory of art, one assembled from resources found in the writings of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre, with an Anglophone strain of radical humanism in the tradition of William Hazlitt.
—John Douglas Millar, Frieze
MoMA, © 2026.
Under the title The Great Art of Living Together, a line lifted from Brecht’s Rede an Dänische arbeiterschauspieler über die kunst der beobachtung / address to Danish worker actors on the art of observation (and that briefly served as a title for this publication for an edition of these translations published by the Granville Press, 1972), the Tenement publication of Poems on the Theatre will conclude with an appendix of afterwords with contributions from the following authors ...
Simon McBurney—actor, writer and director—is one of the most innovative, mercurial and influential theatre-makers working today. In 1983, he co-founded the company Complicité and since then all his work has been made through a deeply researched and highly collaborative process which fuses a profound belief that all aspects of the theatre should challenge the limits of theatrical form. Figures in Extinction, the culmination of Simon’s four-year, cross-continental collaboration with choreographer Crystal Pite for Nederlands Dans Theater premiered in 2025. This is the first time Simon has created a work for a dance company exclusively. In 2024, Mnemonic returned at London’s National Theatre to critical acclaim, 25 years since it first debuted. The award-winning The Encounter (2015) was described as ‘one of the most fully-immersive theatre pieces ever created’ by the New York Times. In 2021, he co-directed Fehinti Balogun’s Can I Live?, a vital digital performance about the climate catastrophe. As well as writing and creating original works, McBurney has brought great plays and adaptations to the stage, most recently, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2022). He also adapted Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising into a twelve-part dramatisation for radio alongside author Robert MacFarlane for the BBC World Service in 2022. Simon’s opera work includes A Dog’s Heart (2010), The Magic Flute (2012), The Rake’s Progress (2017), Wozzeck (2020) and Khovanshchina (2025).
(See complicite.org.)
Tom Overton is John Berger’s biographer. He catalogued the Berger archive at the British Library and edited Portraits: John Berger on Artists (Verso, 2017) and Landscapes: John Berger on Art (Verso, 2016). He is currently an archive curator at the Barbican Centre in London. The Underground Sea, a new volume of Berger’s writings on mines and mine-workers, co-edited with Matthew Harle, was published by Canongate in January 2024. He lives in Sheffield.
(See overton.tw)
Emily Foister works at New York University, where she researches, writes, and teaches on feminism and women’s work, with a focus on precarious archives. She is collaborating with Katya Berger and the feminist writer Mona Chollet to publish a two-volume collection of Anya Berger’s life writing, drawn from the private family archive; it will include short stories, memoir, poetry, diaries, letters, telegrams and doodles.
(See emilyfoister.com.)
Mike Dibb, multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, is perhaps best known for Ways of Seeing, his vastly influential television essay on art and society made with John Berger, but he has directed dozens of important films in a career spanning six decades. The pioneering work undertaken by Dibb across the landscape of the television documentary format operates at the forefront of radical, intellectual ideas combined with a startling facility for empathetic storytelling. Diverse by nature, Dibb’s work has traversed the fields of post-colonial literature, improvisatory jazz, and the very nature of concepts such as creativity and play, while always remaining grounded in everyday experience. His portrait films feature figures as diverse as A.S. Byatt, Salvador Dali, Miles Davis, Stuart Hall, David Hockney, Keith Jarrett, C.L.R. James, Elmore Leonard, Federico García Lorca, Edward Said and Barbara Thompson.
(See mikedibb.co.uk.)
David Constantine has published eleven volumes of poetry with Bloodaxe—including Collected Poems (2004), Nine Fathom Deep (2009), Elder (2014), and Belongings (2020)—alongside two novels and five collections of short fiction with Comma Press, such as Back at the Spike (1994), the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (2005) and The Life-Writer (2015). With his wife Helen, David edited Modern Poetry in Translation for many years and—as translator—has produced works by Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. Winner of the Queen's Medal for Poetry 2020, in 2018 (with Tom Kuhn) Constantine translated The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (Liveright), the most comprehensive English language anthology of Brecht's poetry to date. Constantine’s most recent collection, A Bird Called Elaeus, was published by Bloodaxe in 2024.
(See queens.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-david-constantine-frsl.)
(See complicite.org.)
Tom Overton is John Berger’s biographer. He catalogued the Berger archive at the British Library and edited Portraits: John Berger on Artists (Verso, 2017) and Landscapes: John Berger on Art (Verso, 2016). He is currently an archive curator at the Barbican Centre in London. The Underground Sea, a new volume of Berger’s writings on mines and mine-workers, co-edited with Matthew Harle, was published by Canongate in January 2024. He lives in Sheffield.
(See overton.tw)
Emily Foister works at New York University, where she researches, writes, and teaches on feminism and women’s work, with a focus on precarious archives. She is collaborating with Katya Berger and the feminist writer Mona Chollet to publish a two-volume collection of Anya Berger’s life writing, drawn from the private family archive; it will include short stories, memoir, poetry, diaries, letters, telegrams and doodles.
(See emilyfoister.com.)
Mike Dibb, multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, is perhaps best known for Ways of Seeing, his vastly influential television essay on art and society made with John Berger, but he has directed dozens of important films in a career spanning six decades. The pioneering work undertaken by Dibb across the landscape of the television documentary format operates at the forefront of radical, intellectual ideas combined with a startling facility for empathetic storytelling. Diverse by nature, Dibb’s work has traversed the fields of post-colonial literature, improvisatory jazz, and the very nature of concepts such as creativity and play, while always remaining grounded in everyday experience. His portrait films feature figures as diverse as A.S. Byatt, Salvador Dali, Miles Davis, Stuart Hall, David Hockney, Keith Jarrett, C.L.R. James, Elmore Leonard, Federico García Lorca, Edward Said and Barbara Thompson.
(See mikedibb.co.uk.)
David Constantine has published eleven volumes of poetry with Bloodaxe—including Collected Poems (2004), Nine Fathom Deep (2009), Elder (2014), and Belongings (2020)—alongside two novels and five collections of short fiction with Comma Press, such as Back at the Spike (1994), the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (2005) and The Life-Writer (2015). With his wife Helen, David edited Modern Poetry in Translation for many years and—as translator—has produced works by Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. Winner of the Queen's Medal for Poetry 2020, in 2018 (with Tom Kuhn) Constantine translated The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (Liveright), the most comprehensive English language anthology of Brecht's poetry to date. Constantine’s most recent collection, A Bird Called Elaeus, was published by Bloodaxe in 2024.
(See queens.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-david-constantine-frsl.)