Erwin Piscator

His family was descended from Johannes Piscator, a Protestant theologian who produced an important translation of the Bible in 1600.

Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator (17 December 1893 – 30 March 1966) was a German theatre director and producer.

Along with Bertolt Brecht, he was the foremost exponent of epic theatre, a form that emphasizes the socio-political content of drama, rather than its emotional manipulation of the audience or the production's formal beauty.

Erwin Friedrich Max Piscator was born on 17 December 1893 in the small Prussian village of Greifenstein-Ulm, the son of Carl Piscator, a merchant, and his wife Antonia Laparose.

In 1896, Karl Lautenschläger had installed one of the world's first revolving stages in that theatre.

The family moved to the university town Marburg in 1899 where Piscator attended the Gymnasium Philippinum.

In the autumn of 1913, he attended a private Munich drama school and enrolled at University of Munich to study German, philosophy and art history.

Piscator also took Arthur Kutscher's famous seminar in theatre history, which Bertolt Brecht later also attended.

Piscator began his acting career in the autumn of 1914, in small unpaid roles at the Munich Court Theatre, under the directorship of Ernst von Possart.

During the First World War, Piscator was drafted into the German army, serving in a frontline infantry unit as a Landsturm soldier from the spring of 1915 (and later as a signaller).

The experience inspired a hatred of militarism and war that lasted for the rest of his life.

He wrote a few bitter poems that were published in 1915 and 1916 in the left-wing Expressionist literary magazine Die Aktion.

In summer 1917, having participated in the battles at Ypres Salient and been in hospital once, he was assigned to a newly established army theatre unit.

In November 1918, when the armistice was declared, Piscator participated in the November Revolution, giving a speech in Hasselt at the first meeting of a revolutionary Soldiers' Council (Soviet).

Piscator returned to Berlin and joined the newly formed Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

He left briefly for Königsberg, where he joined the Tribunal Theatre.

He participated in several expressionist plays and played the student, Arkenholz, in the Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg.

He joined Hermann Schüller in establishing the Proletarian Theatre, Stage of the Revolutionary Workers of Greater Berlin.

In collaboration with writer Hans José Rehfisch, Piscator formed a theatre company in Berlin at the Comedy-Theater on Alte Jacobsstrasse, following the Volksbühne ("people's stage") concept.

In 1922–1923 they staged works by Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and Leo Tolstoy.

As stage director at the Volksbühne (1924–1927), and later as managing director at his own theatre (the Piscator-Bühne on Nollendorfplatz), Piscator produced social and political plays especially suited to his theories.

His dramatic aims were utilitarian — to influence voters or clarify left-wing policies.

He used mechanized sets, lectures, movies, and mechanical devices that appealed to his audiences.

In 1926, his updated production of Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers at the distinguished Preußisches Staatstheater in Berlin provoked widespread controversy.

Piscator made extensive cuts to the text and reinterpreted the play as a vehicle for his political beliefs.

He presented the protagonist Karl Moor as a substantially self-absorbed insurgent.

As Moor's foil, Piscator made the character of Spiegelberg, often presented as a sinister figure, the voice of the working-class revolution.

Spiegelberg appeared as a Trotskyist intellectual, slightly reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin with his cane and bowler hat.

As he died, the audience heard The Internationale sung.

Piscator founded the influential (though short-lived) Piscator-Bühne in Berlin in 1927.

In 1928 he produced a notable adaptation of the unfinished, episodic Czech comic novel The Good Soldier Schweik.

The dramaturgical collective that produced this adaptation included Bertolt Brecht.

Brecht later described it as a "montage from the novel".

Leo Lania's play Konjunktur (Oil Boom) premiered in Berlin in 1928, directed by Erwin Piscator, with incidental music by Kurt Weill.

Three oil companies fight over the rights to oil production in a primitive Balkan country, and in the process exploit the people and destroy the environment.

Weill's songs from this play, such as Die Muschel von Margate, are still part of the modern repertoire of art music.

In 1929 Piscator published his The Political Theatre, discussions of the theory of theatre.

In the preface to its 1963 edition, Piscator wrote that the book was "assembled in hectic sessions during rehearsals for The Merchant of Berlin" by Walter Mehring, which had opened on 6 September 1929 at the second Piscator-Bühne.

It was intended to provide "a definitive explanation and elucidation of the basic facts of epic, i.e. political theatre", which at that time "was still meeting with widespread rejection and misapprehension."

Three decades later, Piscator said that: