Trumpets and Drums

It is possible that years from now, when all of Brecht's plays have been performed and assessed, Trumpets and Drums will be considered one of the most successful, at any rate one of the most playable, of all. Certainly its American premiere performance at the Loeb is one of those all-too-rare occasions when all the technical resources of Harvard's drama center have been applied by a skilled cast to a play that is absolutely worth all the effort.

The production's one failing is so glaringly obvious that one wonders how it was possible. Having put all this effort into directing the play, having commissioned Joseph Raposo to do a new musical score, why would Robert Chapman select his cast without any apparent regard for their singing ability? "It's not just a question of having no excellent voices in the company; most of the voices are not passable, the lyrics rarely intelligible. One song is bad enough that the singing must have been intentionally off-key; this is wrong--it makes it impossible to understand the lyrics and this is not supposed to happen in Brecht. The songs are reputetdly the weakest part of this play, but I would refrain from judging them until a later production gives them a chance.

Trumpets and Drums is an adaptation of George Farquahr's The Recruiting Officer, written in 1706. The play was an ideal vehicle for Brecht to tinker with, for the conventions of Restoration comedy his theatrical purposes perfectly. His dream of a didactic theatre, where audiences could watch plays detachedly and learn from them, was spoiled on occasion by audiences that emotionalized over his characters. He rewrote the last scene of Mother Courage so that audiences would be disgusted as his heroine, he children all killed by the war, picked up her wagon and went off following the soldiers. But the audiences wouldn't go along; they idealized Courage as they had Macheath.

Farquahr, however, made no pretense of "character development." The figure in his comedy are caricatures, and no audience can romanticize a caricature--they are human alienation effects. So Brecht can show us his Plumes and Melindas for scene after scene, but leave one free of emotional attachments to them. When a devastating final scene shows the county bourgeois entertaining themselves while thet poor are led off to fight in America, no emotional tie to any of the characters prevents you from condemning them if you choose to. Thus Trumpets and Drums succeeds in doing what Brecht set out to do, in teaching through the drama, but without excessive homilizing.

Farquahr's plot was concerned with a captain and a sergeant who try to recruit a company of soldiers in the country town of Shrewsbury during the War of the Spanish Succession. Brecht changed the time to 1776; his Captain Plume is the hero of Bunker Hill (he won the battle by cutting open a dike so that the American "dirt farmers" fled to try to save their fields). He and Sergeant Kite are unable to recruit men successfully by legal means; they try various tricks and finally resort to a morality campaign which "cleans up" Shrewsbury by having a justice of the peace find the community's able-bodied poor guilty of assorted petty crimes. For punishment they are enlisted into Plume's company and sent off to fight in America.

Chapman's direction is wonderfully sharp; a series of gimmicks keeps the comic scenes rolling and the company makes excellent use of Horace Armistead's sets, the best the Loeb has seen in a long time. The sets are lavish and contain a lot of the props necessary to keep the action rolling, but they permit the visible-to-the-audience scene changes Brecht called for.

There is a great deal of good acting in the production, but none to measure up to Leonard Baker's exceptionally tasteful Plume. There-are a thousand temptations in this role; Baker is on stage almost constantly and is free to enlist the audience's sympathy with a little skillful hamming if he wants to. It is a great credit to him that he is restrained enough to keep from scene-stealing, but energetic enough to be constantly interesting. It is his job to hold the play together and that he does very well.

Bruce Kornbluth's Sergeant Kite is a masterpiece of Villainy; his masquerades as a lady fortune-teller and as a preacher are splendidly done. K. Lype O'Dell's Balance and David Meneghal's Brazen are fine comic parts. In a moment of inspiration, Chapman Laurence Senetlick in the relatively minor role of Simpkins, and Senelick's sniggering, swaggering portrayal of the only poor man who lines up with the bourgeoisie (he's Justice Balance butler) justifies him. Simpkins' description of Bunker Hill is one of the highlights of the evening.

Mark Bramhall and Marjorie Lerstrom drew the two roles most chopped up by the crossfire between Brecht and Farquahr. Farquahr's Worthy is an amorous country gentleman of leisure and a bit of a buffoon; Brecht's is a shoe merchant who plans to sell his boots to the platoon Plume recruits, and his mental temperature oscillates between extremet canniness and extreme romanticism. Bramhall might have made the role gell a bit better by treating some of Worthy's protestations as posturing. Miss Lerstrom faces the same problem with Melinda and resolves it by throwing herself vigorously into the lady's every pose. She loves Worthy ardently, one minute and Brazen with equal passion the next. It works quite well.

Lauren Friedman's Victoria is a bit monotonous once she moves into her male disguise, but the part does not seem to allow for much variety. Gloria Maddox's exaggerated Rose is admirable.

So good an American premiere of a Brecht play should not be allowed to perish after just nine performances; hopefully the Loeb will extend the run; perhaps the show could even be remounted once the school year gets underway.