Man Equals Man

Man Equals Man (German: Mann ist Mann: Die Verwandlung des Packers Galy Gay in den Militärbaracken von Kilkoa im Jahre neunzehnhundertfünfundzwanzig), or A Man's a Man, is a 1926 play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. One of Brecht's earlier works, it explores themes of war, human fungibility, and identity. It is one of the agitprop works inspired by the developments in USSR praising Bolshevik collectivism and the replaceability of each member of the collective (along with the play The Decision (1930) and the poem "Verwisch die Spuren" (1926)). Not only was the play the first to emerge after Brecht's move from Munich to Berlin, but it was also the first to be produced by what came to be known as 'the Brecht collective', "that shifting group of friends and collaborators on whom he henceforth depended. As such it mirrored the artistic climate of the middle 1920s, with their attitude of Neue Sachlichkeit (or New Matter-of-Factness), their stressing of the collectivity and downplaying of the individual, and their new cult of Anglo-Saxon imagery and sport. Together the 'collective' would go to fights, not only absorbing their terminology and ethos (which permeates Man Equals Man) but also drawing those conclusions for the theatre as a whole which Brecht set down in his theoretical essay 'Emphasis on Sport' and tried to realise by means of the harsh lighting, the boxing-ring stage and other anti-illusionistic devices that henceforward appeared in his own productions." As with his earlier In the Jungle (1923), which was set in Chicago, Brecht locates the drama in what was — for his German audience — an exotic setting: British colonial India. Man Equals Man presents the forcible transformation of an Irish civilian, Galy Gay, into the perfect soldier. Using Kiplingesque imagery (as with In the Jungle, though, thanks...