Round Heads and Pointed Heads
| Round Heads and Pointed Heads | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Bertolt Brecht |
| Date premiered | 4 November 1936 |
| Original language | German |
| Genre | Epic parable |
Round Heads and Pointed Heads (German: Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe) is an epic parable play written by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, in collaboration with Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and the composer Hanns Eisler. The play's subtitle is Money Calls to Money and its authors describe it as "a tale of horror." The play is a satirical anti-Nazi parable about a fictitious country called Yahoo in which the rulers maintain their control by setting the people with round heads against those with pointed heads, thereby substituting racial relations for their antagonistic class relations. The play is composed of 11 scenes in prose and blank verse and 13 songs. Unlike another of Brecht's plays from this period, The Mother, Round Heads and Pointed Heads was addressed to a wide audience, Brecht suggested, and took account of "purely entertainment considerations." Brecht's notes on the play, written in 1936, contain the earliest theoretical application of his "defamiliarization" principle to his own "non-Aristotelian" drama.
At the suggestion of Ludwig Berger, the theatre and film director, the play was first conceived in November 1931 as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure for the Young Actors' Group, to be premièred in January 1932 at the Berlin Volksbühne. Brecht considered this play to be Shakespeare's most philosophical and progressive work, which argued that "those in positions of authority [...] ought not to demand of their subjects a moral stance which they cannot adopt themselves." Rehearsals for Brecht's play The Mother distracted him from developing the Round Heads project in December and its planned production in January failed to materialise, but Brecht and his collaborators returned to its development during 1932. The play was re-written in 1934 in preparation for a planned production under the direction of Per Knutzon in Copenhagen, which fears of censorship prevented.
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