Round heads and pointed heads

de Bertolt Brecht

'Round Heads and Pointed Heads' began as an adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure'. Commissioned in 1931 by stage and screen director Ludwig Berger, Brecht's ideas about the play soon took the work beyond straight adaptation, incorporating more and more elements of contemporary political satire. It tells the story of a racial conflict between two classes of citizens, those with pointed heads and those whose heads are round - both as abnormal as each other - in the fictional town of Luma. Written in the early 1930s, it finally received its premiere in Copenhagen on 4 November 1936, before being published in German in 1938.