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 * Sandbox for the article on Mr Puntila and his Man Matti

Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti) is an epic comedy by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht.

The story describes the Landlord Puntila's relationship to his servant, Matti, as well as his daughter, Eva, who he wants to marry off to an Attaché. Eva herself loves Matti and so Puntila has to decide whether to marry his daughter to a driver or to an Attaché, while he also deals with his drinking problem.

Brecht's play is based on another by his host during his exile in Finland—the Finnish-Estonian playwright Hella Wuolijoki—called The Sawdust Princess, a German translation of which Wuolijoki dictated to Margarete Steffin during August 1940. Wuolijoki's work had the dramatic structure of a well-made play, which, Brecht concluded, hampered her achievement as a writer. Its protagonist, Puntila (who is described as a "Finnish Bacchus"), was based on a cousin of Wuolijoki's former husband called Roope Juntula. Juntula had become engaged with three village women and had also driven his Buick recklessly in the middle of the night to procure alcohol—both episodes that would be dramatised in Brecht's story. Woulijoki suggested a collaboration with Brecht on an entry for the competition run by the Finish Dramatists' League for a "people's play," whose deadline was to fall in October. The title page of Brecht's play describes it as "a people's play" that is "after stories and a draft play by Hella Wuolijoki." Brecht began work on his Non-Aristotelian version of the story on 2 September and finished a first draft three weeks later. Along with the structural transformation from dramatic to epic, Brecht described his main tasks in re-working Wuolijoki's original as: "to bring out the underlying farce, dismantle the psychological discussions so as to make place for tales from Finnish popular life or statements of opinion, find a theatrical form for the master/man contradiction, and give the theme back its poetic and comic aspects." Brecht gave his story a downbeat ending, in which Matti resigns himself to the impossibility of authentic human relationships across the divide of social class, excepting the intoxicated illusions that alcohol provides. Brecht transformed the treatment of alcoholism from a national problem for the Finnish, as it was dramatised in The Sawdust Princess, to a farcial aspect of the class war, as Brecht's own epic treatment presented it.

The central relationship between Mr Puntila and Mattiçin which Puntila is warm, friendly and loving when drunk, but cold, cynical and penny-pinching when sober—echoes the relationship between the Tramp and the Millionaire in Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931).