About the work
Mr Puntila and His Man Matti is a "folk play" by Bertolt Brecht, written in 1940 in Finnish exile in collaboration with Hella Wuolijoki and premiered in 1948 at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. It belongs to Brecht's mature comedies rooted in epic theatre and combines bawdy humour with sharp social criticism.
Plot
The Finnish landowner Puntila is a divided man: drunk, he is warm-hearted, humane, and generous; sober, by contrast, cold, calculating, and domineering. His chauffeur Matti, a shrewd proletarian, sees through his master's moods and preserves his dignity and reason between Puntila's bouts of intoxication. In the interplay of drunkenness and sobriety—such as at the engagement of Puntila's daughter and a drunken "engagement" to four village women—the play exposes the irreconcilability of class interests. In the end Matti leaves his incorrigible master.
Cultural significance
Mr Puntila is among Brecht's most frequently performed comedies and shows his technique of the alienation effect in cheerful form. The figure of the drunken landowner as "a human being only when intoxicated" is a comic yet bitter parable about the mendacity of class society. Brecht himself staged the play in 1949 as one of the founding productions of his Berliner Ensemble; it is a fixture of the German-language repertoire.