Bertolt Brecht's play Drums in the Night

Available for over a year

1922: The Birth of Now - Ten programmes in which Matthew Sweet investigates objects and events from 1922, the crucial year for modernism, that have an impact today. 4. Drums in the Night. When a culture finds itself in ruins, as Europe's did after the First World War, it faces, too, the possibility of new beginnings. Bertolt Brecht's play, first performed in 1922, introduced the concept of a very new kind of emotional alienation in theatre, something contemporary dramatists make powerful use of today. Brecht also looked back to theatre’s Greek roots. Matthew Sweet and guests including the scholar of German literature and culture Karen Leeder, and the author Frances Stonor Saunders, explore Modernism’s rejection of Victorian sentimentality and often its rejection of emotion altogether. Germany opened a Museum of Hygiene, and in Britain, the National Council for Mental Hygiene was formed in this key year, 1922. What did Modernists find unhygienic, how did they go about attempting to clean it up and how does this continue now? Producer: Eliane Glaser