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News Summary, Weather. ›y LEON TROTSKY A still from the new version of 'October', showing the fraternization between Russian and German troops at the front in 1917.

THE ADDITION of a sound track, music--and, dare we. guess, one or two sneakingly lengthened shots of Trotsky in this version of 'October'-do little to enhance the value of the film as we have known it. This stands good even if this is a visually refreshing new print.

The substance of the ghost (if I might be permitted that expression) of the Prince of Denmark in this version of Hamlet has only received more dimension. It is still, to all intents and purposes, Hamlet without the Prince.

But this does seem to point to a matter of greater interest to all those who combat Stalinism and its poisonous fruits, even in the field of culture.

Does not this exercise of the Soviet film industry indicate the existence of further material, the very cuts Eisenstein was forced to make in his film after its first showing to members of Stalin's entourage, viz. the references to Trotsky?

I have always suspected that somewhere in the vaults of the Soviet film archives, there lies the original, uncut version of 'October'.

If not, then in all probability the original cuts and deleted fragments could still be suffering a similar fate.

We also know that Eisenstein was in the habit, or THE DAUNTING thing about going to any West End theatre is that it is unequivocally middle-class territory.

The faces in the audience, the styles of clothing, the gossip in the aisles, the wellbred thuggery in the bars, where overworked attendants ladle out gins and tonics, the rustle of programmes-all these announce an enclave of bourgeois supremacy.

There is an atmosphere of collusion, a sense of ritual where class identities are reinforced in a reverent if often bewildered respect for the tombstones of culture, the masterpieces of the past, or with a kind of interested regard for the latest work from the pen of either an author who shares their world view or provides them with a therapeutic and often masochistic tremor between dinner and bed.

There is a sense of modish ceremony, of inpenetrability, of a preoccupation with form for form's sake in these isolated pockets from some other era.

And on the stage so often the charade is echoed by the actors, whose modulated voices, caressed from the belly, intone such resonant melodies that never issue from the tongue of any living man.

Backwater

What is this curious w orld of voice production and gesture, which draws its b ood not from the vigour and struggle of the real world, but Price: one shilling From New Park Publications, 186a, Clapham High Street, SW4 from the rarified backwaters of drama school speech training.

The cold hand of death, of hollow forms, grips this, the most potently living kind of creative expression.

Why is it that the potential of the drama, which confronts living audiences with living performers in the flesh, where the conflicts and passions of an era could be expounded publicly, has about as much living dynamism as an afternoon tea shop ?

The theatre is dead, for it is a haven for a dying class; it reflects the stagnation of that class.

Last year in France, during the May-June days, the Odeon was occupied.

The Odeon is possibly the most bourgeois of bourgeois theatres, but the stylized forms of empty drama were replaced by the living passion of polemics.

The building was crowded day and night. A new strength of release was found as the possibility of revolutionary change gripped the imagination of workers and students.

Release

So it will be here when the revolution releases all the This is parody writ large which is the key to the theory of 'alienation', where the actor demonstrates gesture and intonation and reveals the essence of social and political man.

And what is Brecht showing in this play? In tracing the rise to power of a Chicago gangster called Ui, he describes the rise to power of Hitler in Germany.

What he emphasizes is not the personal dynamism of Ui —on the contrary, he is shown as a nonentity-but the objective economic forces impelling such a rise.

In a sequence of scenes first Ui is totally rejected by the bourgeoisie as an unpleasant thug, but when the shares start falling and a financial crisis breaks, Ui's methods of protection, of murder and violence, are the only ones that can ensure the survival of private enterprise.

It is an imaginative and clear exposition, rich in allusions and parodies.

Weakness

But the central weakness in the play flows from Brecht's involvement with Stalinism.

For, although the crisis of capitalism is grasped, the mystery still remains why Hitler's rise to power was not challenged by the only historical force that could challenge itthe working class.

To understand the defeat of the most powerfully organized working class in the world demands an understanding of the role of Stalinism.

Brecht was incapable of confronting that question. Like many others, Stalinism thwarted his political developConsequently the only conscious expression of the work-