Set in British colonial India, Man Equals Manpresents the forcible transformation of a civilian, Galy Gay, into the perfect soldier. Using Kiplingesque imagery, 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 Arcade edition is based on the final version of the play of 1954 (whereas the Bentley translation is based on public domain material of 1926, many years before Brecht finished revising the play). Our edition includes The Elephant Calf,which was originally part of the main play.
The translation by Gerhard Nellhaus (and by Brecht himself, who made his own English version of the first scene) has been equipped by the editors, John Willett and Ralph Manheim, with Brecht's own notes and relevant texts as well as with an extensive editorial commentary on the genesis and variant versions of the play.
