Bøger i Brecht, Bertolt serien

Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre - it became a popular hit throughout the western world.Published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features extensive notes and commentary including an introduction to the play, Brecht's own notes on the play, a full appendix of textual variants, a note by composer Kurt Weill, a transcript of a discussion about the play between Brecht and a theatre director, plus editorial notes on the genesis of the play.

Edward II is, in a sense, Bertolt Brecht's only tragedy. Based on Christopher Marlowe's classic of the same name, it departs from its source as widely as The Threepenny Opera departs from Gay's Beggar's Opera. Brecht has made a multitude of technical changes calculated to streamline the play, with a smaller cast and simpler action, and he has created virtually new and totally compelling characters with his extravagant variations on Anne, Edward's queen, and Mortimer, the villain of the piece. Brecht also reinterprets Marlowe's famously homosexual protagonist, creating an Edward initially more crudely homoerotic and ultimately more truly heroic. Brecht's Edward is a hero for the modern era: an existential hero defying a meaningless universe with his courage.

These six plays represent the best and most humorous of Brecht's shorter works. The Jewish Wife is from the Fear and Misery in the Third Reich cycle of one-act plays, which, along with In Search of Justice and The Informer, chromicles the hardships of life in Nazi Germany.