A Close Reading of The Caucasian Chalk Circle – and other

unfinished business

Not the most original of titles. Bring back the Chicken jokes, that’s what I say ….

Provided an overview of Brecht’s political beliefs and how they influenced his conception of theatrical practice

Taken a close look at Brecht’s quarrel with Aristotelian dramaturgy (catharisis, the inevitable fall of the hero)

Suggested ways by which Brechtian dramaturgy represents a continuity with Sophoclean drama (choric element) and Ibsen’s dramatic texts (social role of the dramatist)

Hinted at how Brecht’s theatre provides a synthesis of naturalistic methods with symbolic, expressionistic techniques (contrast between Ibsen and Jarry)

The Story so far ….

vs

Brecht’s use of new technology: use of captions, film projections

Set Design

Brecht’s techniques for training actors (gestic acting)

Contrast between the Stanislavski ‘Method’ -

“[W]hen present-day audiences attend a stage play, they find the stage set with scenes and actors on the same unimaginative scale used since the proscenium box-stage emerged from the sixteenth century renaissance theatre. At most we have musical-comedy splendour on that stage. So little have the old forms changed in a new world!”.

Research in sound holds out unimaginable possibilities in the use of music and voice effects in the theatre. Film projections, the colour organ, the interchange on stage between light and ‘film light’, complete motorization of the stage – through these, and how many other, innovations modern creative science can supplant the ancient peep-show.

Three functions of film projections:

Didactic – presents material that one would normally find in theatre programme notes

Dramatic – such a film projection is used to advance the story quickly

Commentary – captions and data, addressing the audience directly

Verfremdungseffeckt – Alienation Effect – A-effect

Do you really believe what this “lecturer” is telling you???

3 August 1940, Journals:

1) Under the aristotelian system of constructing a play and the style of acting that goes with it … the audience’s deception with regard to the way in which the incidents on the stage come about and take place in real life is helped by the fact that the story’s presentation forms an indivisible whole. Its details cannot be compared one by one with their corresponding parts in real life. Nothing may be taken ‘out of its context’ in order, say, to set it in the context of reality. The answer lies in the alienating style of acting.

3 August 1940, Journals:

2) To achieve the a-effect the actor must give up his complete conversion into the stage character. He shows the character. He quotes his lines, he repeats a real-life incident. The audience is not entirely ‘carried away.

Man Equals Man (1931 Production)

The speeches’ content was made up of contradictions, and the actor had not to make the spectator identify himself with the individual sentences and so get caught up in contradictions, but to keep him out of them. Taken as a whole it had to be the most objective possible exposition of a contradictory internal process. . . . The impression was of a man simply reading a case for the defence prepared at some quite different period, without understanding what it meant as he did so.

• Transposition into the third person

• Transposition into the past

• Speaking the stage directions aloud

• That the stage and auditorium must be purged of everything ‘magical’

• The actor must invest what he has to show with a definite gest of showing

• One must drop the assumption that there is a fourth wall cutting the audience off from the stage

“Not long ago I was walking home with Paul. On a boulevard we ran into a large crowd. I like street scenes, so I pushed into the centre of it, and there my eyes fell on a horrible picture. At my feet lay an old man, poorly dressed, his jaw crushed, both arms cut off. His face was ghastly; his old yellow teeth stuck out through his bloody moustache. A street car towered over its victim.” (p.170)

The Street Scene

The Street Scene

(A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre)

• His demonstration should not be too perfect (it would be spoilt if the bystanders’ attention were drawn to his powers of transformation)

• Need not imitate every aspect of his character’s behaviour, but only so much as gives a picture

• The demonstrator should derive his characters entirely from their actions – he imitates their actions and so allows conclusions to be drawn about them (not basing the actions on the characters)

• The demonstration should have a socially practical significance

•Visual memory

•Emotional memory

•“Always and for ever, when you are on the stage, you must play yourself. But it will be in an infinite variety of combinations of objectives, and given circumstance which you have prepared for your part, and which have been smelted in the furnace of your emotional memory. This is the best and only true material for inner creativeness.”

Do not trust this man

Everything he says may well be wrong

Michael Morley, Brecht: A Study:

[T]he play is concerned with posing a series of basic human questions seen within both a moral and a social context: legal justice versus practical justice; rightness versus expediency; good versus evil; new values versus established values; reason and feeling versus sentimentality; the claims of the natural mother versus those of the adoptive mother. Put thus, the arguments of the play might seem straightforward to the point of naïveté, particularly since the text is dotted with apt epigrams in which the relative claims of each side are summed up in lapidary language. But the audience is intended to examine each position critically: below the surface of a remark which convinces by virtue of its terse simplicity lies a complex of issues.

T.C. Worsely:

“One thing I am sure of is that The Caucasian Chalk Circle will bore he pants off any average English audience”

What does he know???

Harold Hobson:

“I am bound in honesty to add that, except for parts of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, they bored and annoyed me. I believe the thesis on which I take them to be founded is false. To claim that the theatre, where hundreds of people are crowded together in conditions of more or less discomfort, is a suitable place for clear thinking seems to me childish”

A prime idiot if ever there was one …

Kenneth Tynan:

“Once in a generation the world discovers a new way of telling a story; this generation’s pathfinder is Brecht, both as a playwright and director of the Berliner Ensemble’. He described Brecht’s method “as shocking and revolutionary as a cold shower”

We like him!

Brecht in Perspective:

“The first element in this reciprocal relationship between comedy and Verfremdung is the way in which comedy can be used to generate Verfremdung. Tragedy depends on our acceptance that the tragic hero’s fall is inevitable, since the social, moral or metaphysical forces against which he struck out are immutable, and thus it works primarily on our emotions. Comedy on the other hand appeals to the intellect …. Comedy depends … on the ‘incongrous’, the gap between ‘what things are and what they ought to be’ … Comedy is about paradoxes and absurdities in society and behaviour, about things not being what they seem.”

The chicken was female and obviously interpreted the pole on which the crosswalk sign was mounted as a phallic symbol of which she was envious …

Sigmund Freud

OK – one more “Why did the chicken cross the road” joke ….

Scene 4: The Wedding

The Monk: All right. We declare this marriage contracted. Now what about Extreme Unction?

The Mother: Nothing doing! The wedding was quite expensive enough. I must now take care of the mourners.

The juxtaposition between the wedding and the funeral

The primacy of monetary considerations

The fact that the monk is “a cheap monk”, “a fifty-piastre priest”

The Monk: Dear wedding guests and mourners! We stand deeply moved in front of a bed of death and marriage, because the bride gets into bed and the groom into the grave. The groom is already washed, and the bride is already hot. For in the marriage-bed lies the last Will, and that makes people randy.

Why does Grusha marry Jussup?: “A stamp makes all the difference. Without a stamp even the Shah of Persia couldn’t prove he is the Shah. And you’ll have a roof over your head”

Jussup’s reasons for feigning illness – are we to condemn his pacifism?

Jussup’s treatment of Grusha – “I’d be surprised if you hadn’t been up to something in the city. What else would you be here for?” – but she was using him.

The Singer:

There was a great yearning but there was no waiting.

The oath is broken. Why was not disclosed.

Hear what she thought, but didn’t say:

While you fought in the battle, soldier

The bloody battle, the bitter battle

I found a child who was helpless

And hadn’t the heart to do away with it.

I had to care for what otherwise would have come to harm

Brecht in Perspective:

“Critical comedy presupposes Utopia . . . . Brecht’s comedy is an attempt to grasp the world intellectually, to render experience relative, not absolute as in tragedy, to compare the real with the idea to the cost of the former, or, from the perspective of the optimistic socialism of the later Brecht, to compare the present with the future Utopia.”

The Govenor’s Wife watching a young woman attendant: Don’t tear the sleeve!

The Young Woman: I promise you, madam, no harm has come to the dress.

The Govenor’s Wife: Because I caught you. I’ve been watching you for some time. Nothing in your head but making eyes at the adjudant. I’ll kill you, you bitch. She beats her.

First Doctor to second: May I remind you, Niko Mikadze, that I was against the lukewarm bath? A minor oversight in warming the bath water, Your Grace.

Second Doctor equally polite: I can’t possibly agree with you, Mikha Loladze. The temperature of the bath water was the one prescribed by our great and beloved Mishiko Oboladze. More likely a slight draught in the night, Your Grace.

p.27:

The Elderly Lady: That innkeeper certainly takes his time. The whole country has lost its manners since those goings on in the capital.

p.26 The old man and grusha: 3 piastres – no class solidarity

p.21 The Govenor’s Wife – 1000 piastres

The monk’s 50 piastres’ worth of piety

The bribes given to the Judges

You should realise that these slides are part of the Alienation Effect – the lecturer’s “cunning plan” to get you to question his “authority”

August Strindberg

What will also bother simple minds is that my motivation of the action is not simple, and that there is not a single point of view. Every event in life — and this is a fairly new discovery! — is usually the result of a whole series of more or less deep-seated motives, but the spectator usually selects the one that he most easily understands or that best flatters his powers of judgement. Someone commits suicide. 'Business worries', sys the business man. 'Unrequited love', say the ladies. 'Physical illness', says the sick man, ''Shattered hopes', says the failure. But it may well be that the motive lay in all of these things, or in none of them, and that the dead man concealed his real motive by emphasizing quite a different one that shed the best possible light on his memory.

- Preface to Miss Julie

Strindberg: A Dream Play

Character:

     Voice (special accent)

     Action (robotic movement)

     Mask (covers the face)

     Body (vast carapace)

  Absence of psychological realism

Journals, 15 June 1944:

Suddenly I am not happy with Grusha in the C[aucasian] C[halk] C[ircle]. She should be simple and look like Breughel’s mad meg, a beast of burden. She should be stubborn and nor rebellious, submissive and not good, long-suffering and not incorruptible etc etc. This simplicity must in no way be equated with ‘wisdom’ (the well-known stereotype), but it is quite consonant with a practical bent, and even with a certain cunning and an eye for human qualities ….

Ronald Grey, “On Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle”:

Courage, perseverance, motherliness, dutifulness, self-sacrifice she shows time and again. Yet because of her equanimity and lack of self-regard, these qualities have no false ring. And this is due also in part to the deliberately non-naturalistic language she speaks. Brecht makes no attempt to reproduce peasant speech faithfully: Grusha’s is sprinkled with proverbs and dialect forms …. Subtly and continuously through the language Brecht persuades us not quite to believe in Grusha, to accept her as a creation of art ….

Journals, 8 May 1944:

The problem of how to construct the figure of Azdak held me up for two weeks until I realised the social reason for his behaviour. At first all I had was his disgraceful handling of the law, under which the poor came off well. I knew I couldn’t show that he law as it exists has to be bent if justice is to be done, but realised I had to show how, with a truly careless, ignorant, downright bad judge, things can turn out all right for those who are actually in need of justice. That is why Azdak had to have those selfish, amoral, parasitic features, and be the lowest and most decrepit of judges. But I was still lacking some basic cause of a social kind. And I found it in his disappointment that the fall of the old rulers did not bring about a new age, but just an age of new rulers, as a consequence of which he continues to dispense bourgeois justice, but in a degenerate, subversive fashion ….

Because it could not stop for Death.

Emily Dickinson

The very last “Why did the chicken cross the road” joke: