New Blu-ray box sets released by the BBC this week will include Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, which stars David Bowie.
Bowie plays the title character, a debauched artist-poet who defies bourgeois society and roams the countryside womanising, brawling and, finally (spoiler-alert), committing murder. Bowie, who had recently performed in The Elephant Man on Broadway, acted and sang the lead role, alongside a cast that included Jonathan Kent and Zoë Wanamaker. This clip shows the film’s “ichthyosaurus” monologue which introduces the play. Originally shown in 1982, Baal was directed by Alan Clarke.
“David Bowie seems like a nice boy, though people kept calling him ugly and fat (one wonders if Brecht had someone rather different in mind). He has a powerful presence, a voice sandpapered perfectly flat, and he made everyone else look as if they were acting.”
Excerpt from Nancy Banks-Smith’s 1982 Guardian review
Baal was Brecht’s first full length play, written in 1918 when he was a 20-year-old student at Munich University, in response to the expressionist drama The Loner (Der Einsame) by the soon-to-become-Nazi dramatist Hanns Johst.
The play is written in a form of heightened prose and includes four songs and an introductory choral hymn (“Hymn of Baal the Great”), set to melodies composed by Brecht himself. Brecht wrote it prior to developing the dramaturgical techniques of epic theatre that characterize his later work, although he did re-work the play in 1926.
Bowie’s recordings of the play’s five songs were released as an EP, David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht’s Baal.
Baal is included in the Blu-ray box set Dissent and Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969-1989) and in the DVD box set Alan Clarke at the BBC, Volume 2: Disruption (1978-1989), out this week.