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                            Hans-Thies Lehmann, Walter Asmus, and Carl Weber
                                                   Chair: Moray McGowan 
Auerbach's Keller, the drinking scene of students in Leipzig, when 
Faust and Mephisto enter, and Mephisto tries to entertain Faust by 
making him part of this drunken group of students. Brecht was sitting 
there in his armchair, and four actors were on stage trying to fall off the
table. For nearly two hours. Always in a different fashion, and Brecht 
was laughing and amusing himself. And I really thought: they are on a 
break. This is just horseplay. Then I realized, no, this was rehearsal! 
What he tried to find was, as you said about Didi and Gogo falling in 
Godot, the most precise, the most effective, the best possible way to 
show this drunken behaviour of these students in Leipzig. So every 
actor tried at least fifteen to twenty different ways of falling off a table.
Until they finally arrived at the solution they felt was possibly the best,
and Brecht agreed to it and said, that's how we should do it. There was 
an endless playfulness in Brecht's rehearsals. That's one of the great 
things I remember about Brecht rehearsing. It was always playful. And 
the moment in rehearsal when it stopped being playful, and became 
tedious or laborious, he stopped and went to another scene, because 
he felt the atmosphere for rehearsal had become sterile. 
         Question: My question is directed towards Hans-Thiess 
Lehmann and your point about the actors and the audience as a 
colloquium. In a play like The Good Person of Szechwan, the issue 
that emerges can't be resolved by the actors. They play it out for the 
audience. Do you see any relationship between such ideas of Brecht 
and the work of Augusto Boal? 
         Hans-Thies Lehmann: Yes, certainly. I would like to continue 
your point. For me it is not so much this seeming, only apparent 
openness of the discussion at the end of the play: "Es mug ein guter
Schlug gefunden werden, mug, mug, mug.." I would say that is only 
the compromise again. What I'm thinking of is the tendency Brecht 
had to create, as in the Learning Plays, a kind of structure-not for 
audiences, but as a practice of gesture-which would develop into 
something different from the theater of fiction in general, an effort 
which he could not pursue. It is interesting to compare this with the 
tendency of performance. Such an attempt was, of course, neither 
institutionally nor politically possible. But it is, I think, the most 
creative point. And there is a kind of d~pense, how do you translate 
this term of Bataille, I don't know what you would say, Verausgabung? 
There is a kind of dkpense of the theater, which starts there, that people
give only in the theatrical moment. They would give a new structure to 
the plays, and not place first the perfection of the work. There is a 
nearly incredible passage in the Fatzer-I cannot quote by heart, it is 
very important-where it says more or less: now look to the story, we 
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