TEHRAN – The Iranian Artists Forum (IAF) in Tehran will host the performance of the 1940 play “Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti” by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht from Sunday.

Mikail Shahrestani has directed the 90-minute epic comedy at the Entezami Hall of the IAF, Mehr reported.

The story describes the aristocratic land-owner Puntila's relationship to his servant, Matti, as well as his daughter, Eva, whom he wants to marry off to an Attaché. Eva herself loves Matti and so Puntila has to decide whether to marry his daughter to his driver or to an Attaché, while he also deals with a drinking problem.

In his essay "Notes on the Folk Play" (written in 1940), Brecht warns that “naturalistic acting is not enough in this case” and recommends an approach to staging that draws on the Commedia dell'Arte.

The central relationship between Mr. Puntila and Matti—in which Puntila is warm, friendly and loving when drunk, but cold, cynical and penny-pinching when sober—echoes the relationship between the Tramp and the Millionaire in Charlie Chaplin's “City Lights” (1931). 

The duality of Mr. Puntila is an example of Brecht's use of the literary device, the split character. The play is also an inspiration for some of the main characters in Vishal Bhardwaj's “Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola”.

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (1898 – 1956), known as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theater practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The “Threepenny Opera” with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. 

Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, Brecht wrote didactic “Lehrstücke” and became a leading theoretician of epic theater (which he later preferred to call “dialectical theater”).

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Brecht fled his home country, initially to Scandinavia. During World War II he moved to Southern California where he established himself as a screenwriter, while also being surveilled by the FBI. 

In 1947, he was part of the first group of Hollywood film artists to be subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee for alleged Communist Party affiliations. The day after testifying, he returned to Europe, eventually settling in East Berlin where he co-founded the theater company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel.

His other notable works include “Life of Galileo,” “Mother Courage and Her Children,” “The Good Person of Szechwan,” “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” and “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”.

“Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti” will remain on stage through June 2 at the IAF, located at the Artists Park, North Mousavi Street, Taleqani Street.

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