Man Equals Man

Man Equals Man (German: Mann ist Mann), or A Man's a Man, is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. One of Brecht's earlier works, it explores themes of war, human fungibility, and identity.

Not only was the play the first to emerge after Brecht's move from Munich to Berlin, but it was also the first to be produced by what came to be known as 'the Brecht collective':

As with his earlier In the Jungle (1923), which was set in Chicago, Brecht locates the drama in what was for his German audience an exotic setting, British colonial India. Man Equals Man presents the forcible transformation of a civilian, Galy Gay, into the perfect soldier. Using Kiplingesque imagery (as with In the Jungle, though, thanks to Elisabeth Hauptmann's command of English, in a more authentic tone now), Brecht explores personality as something that can be dismantled and reassembled like a machine, in a parable that critic Walter Kerr credited with a “curious foreshadowing of the art of brainwashing.” The same characters exist in the short interlude The Elephant Calf.