Brecht in Asia and Africa 
 
 
admired by the progressive sector of the Thai public. After studying the

Brecht play, Surachai came up with his version of the songs, thereby 
putting an effective local artistic and intellectual vehicle at the service

of the German bard while at the same time assimilating him into a 
progressive movement within the framework of Thai contemporary art. 
But on the whole, Leben des Galilei was taken as an exemplary act of 
writing and a well-made play, and demands have since been constantly 
made that Thai writers should take up writing original spoken dramas. 
On another front, in anticipation of what is still to come, one Drama 
Department has decided to relax its requirements for a drama thesis: 
instead of having to come up with an original text and to stage it, the 
candidate can now put on a production of an existing play, which could 
be a translation or an adaption of foreign work. It is known that the 
decision was made as a result of the impact of Brecht's Galilei. It would

appear that for educational purposes, it would be more advisable to go 
to the Brecht school, if you could not write like him! One could here 
speak of relevance with a vengeance. 
     In spite of the overall success of Leben des Galilei, colleagues in

Drama Departments felt that this production was still too much of a 
"literary" reading in which the theater remained too subservient
to the 
text. They would have loved to see a more theatrically exciting Brecht. 
The next Brecht production responded to this demand. Ostensibly 
staged as a contribution to the International Year of Peace 1986 with 
part of the proceeds going to charity, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 
presented by the Drama Department of Chulalongkorn University could 
be described as a "grand spectacle." Given a theater with a capacity
of 
1700, namely the newly renovated Chulalongkorn University Auditorium 
with its gilded proscenium and sumptuous interior that strives to outdo 
the Musikvereinsaal of Vienna, this version of Mutter Courage had to 
amplify itself in almost every way, the actors themselves having no 
choice but to rely on wireless microphones. In order to do justice to the

grandeur of the locale, Mutter Courage decided to become a musical 
and not a bad musical at that. The music composed by an American 
musician and composer, a long-time resident highly recognized by the 
Thai themselves as an expert on Thai music, was masterly performed by 
top-notch brass players from the University Music School with the 
composer at the electronic keyboard. So powerful and so captivating 
was the music that it stole the show altogether. The songs adapted into 
Thai and set to a rather demanding music of the order of Westside Story 
could not be managed by the actors on the stage who had to resort to 
lipsinging. Moreover, the choreography designed by an ex-Broadway 
choreographer was so lively that the public found Mutter Courage and 
Eilif dancing a "cha-cha-cha" rather attractive. In spite of this
musical 
overbalance, the anti-war message was not completely lost. But that 
message did not come through in the Brechtian dramatic text, nor in the 
dialogue: it came across in an impactful and pleasurable way in the 
music and songs, if one listened attentively enough. Brecht was still 
relevant to a society in which the military remained in the 
consciousness of every citizen. The military parade at the end, an 
appropriate finale to a musical, should drive home this point, although 
 
 
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