Bertolt Brecht's work journals trace his years of exile (the period from 1934 to 1955) in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and America, as well as his return, via Switzerland, to East Berlin. These journals include his perceptive and at times polemical critiques of other writers and intellectuals, but the accounts of his own writing practice provide the greatest insights into the creation of his dramatic work as well as the development of his politics and theories about epic theatre. There are memorable and revealing passages: about D'Annunzio and Ezra Pond, about the bombing of Germany, about the...

Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre - it became a popular hit throughout the western world.
Published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features extensive notes and commentary including an introduction to the play, Brecht's own...