Play: Ba'al

Overview
Baal (1918) is Bertolt Brecht’s first play, an early, raw work that follows a gifted, feral poet who rejects bourgeois society and devours life with destructive appetite. Cast in short, episodic scenes threaded with songs and poems, it tracks Baal’s rise as a notorious outsider, his trail of seductions and betrayals, and his descent into criminality and isolation. The result is an anti-portrait of the romantic genius: a man exalted for his talent yet stripped of heroism, whose vitality ruins those around him and finally himself.

Plot
The action opens in a restaurant and salon where a publisher courts the young Baal, eager to turn his earthy verses into marketable art. Baal refuses to be shaped, mocks the patrons’ refinement, and quickly proves his contempt by seducing the publisher’s wife. From there he drifts through taverns and rooms, eating, drinking, and bedding anyone drawn to his rough charisma, treating language and bodies as resources for his pleasure.

One conquest, a naive girl named Johanna, is enchanted by his songs and promises. After he discards her, she drowns herself, a death that echoes through later scenes as another of Baal’s casual devastations. He takes to the road with his closest companion, Ekart, a fellow drifter and the only figure who can match Baal’s appetite for freedom. The pair sing for their keep, wander forests and village edges, and live off admirers. Baal’s ego and hunger, however, corrode even this bond. He impregnates women he will not support, alienates friends, and treats loyalty as a chain to be broken.

As Ekart seeks other company, Baal’s jealousy boils into violence. In a wooded night scene, he stabs Ekart and flees. Now pursued, diseased, and rapidly spent, Baal retreats deeper into the countryside. Denied shelter, he collapses in a forester’s hut. Under a cold sky that once symbolized his pagan freedom, he dies alone, his body finally as empty as the boasts that filled the rooms he haunted.

Baal and those around him
Baal is a study in refusal: he refuses moneyed patronage, sentimental love, or communal obligation. His art springs from the body and the earth, wine, meat, sex, rain, but he treats people as instruments for sensation. Ekart mirrors Baal’s freedom without his egomania; their partnership shows what Baal might have been if desire did not curdle into possession. The women who orbit him, most memorably Johanna, expose how his seductive authenticity masks exploitation. Bourgeois figures, for their part, want Baal as ornament: the salon prizes the thrill of primitive genius until it threatens their decorum.

Style and themes
Brecht’s scenes are compact and cinematic, punctuated by songs that frame action with lyrical commentary rather than psychological explanation. Nature imagery saturates the language, storms, forests, night skies, casting Baal as a pagan force of fertility and decay. The play assaults two myths at once: the bourgeois myth that art refines life, and the bohemian myth that unfettered instinct is liberation. Baal’s appetites desacralize both; his freedom is real and ruinous, his authenticity inseparable from cruelty.

Ending and significance
Baal’s lonely death closes a trajectory from notoriety to nothingness: the body that scorned limits meets its final limit, and the world neither punishes nor redeems him beyond that fact. As an early expressionist work, the play prefigures Brecht’s later epic theater by refusing catharsis and sentimentality, leaving a rough-edged parable about talent unmoored from responsibility and a society eager to consume the spectacle of the outsider without confronting the cost.