EPIC THEATRE

Bertolt BrechtPLAYWRIGHTDIRECTORTHEORIST

PRACTITIONER

Born 10th February 1898, Germany.Wrote first play Baal in 1918, aged twenty.His ideas have revolutionised playwriting,

production techniques and acting.Brecht is widely regarded as one of the

most important figures in 20th century theatre.

He is considered by many to be the most influential person in theatre since World War II.

Brecht’s most famous plays

The Threepenny Opera (1928)

Mother Courage and her Children (1938-39)

The Life of Galileo (1937-39)

The Good Woman of Setzuan (1938-40)

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944-45)

The influence of ExpressionismBrecht collaborated with fellow German Erwin

Piscator on his ideas for the theatre.

Both men were influenced by Expressionism, a movement that was strong in Germany, but more successful in the visual than performing arts.

Expressionism in the theatre asked for distortion of line, mass, colour, shape and balance with sets and props.

Make-up and costume were more often used to reflect social roles than to depict everyday appearance.

Brecht’s BeliefsHis approach to theatre arose from a strong dislike of

traditional theatre, especially the pretentious German Classic stage of his era.

Brecht felt that identification with characters (from an actor and audience perspective) made thought impossible.

Epic theatre does not follow typical naturalistic narrative exposition e.g. the slow introduction of character and plot. Characters can be introduced directly by flashing their names on a screen, or a narrator could tell the audience how the play would end and supply background information, then perform the story.

Origins of Epic Theatre Events occur over a long period of time, using several

locations or settings for the action.

His plays were sometimes told from the viewpoint of one character (a single storyteller). This technique left the spectator emotionally detached from the events on stage.

He called his drama a ‘theatre for the scientific age’.

Brecht’s plays were didactic (aimed to teach) and his was a social activist theatre, asking the spectator to create social and political change in the outside world.

The Good Woman of Sechzuan has two alternate endings (neither of which is a resolution), then an epilogue asking the audience to create their own plot ending.

Ideas were linked to his Marxist beliefs that man can be nothing but evil, greedy and corrupt in a capitalist world.

Parables in his plays were used to distance the spectator marginally from the events on stage.

Parables were often presented in the form of songs. Emotion on stage was limited, as Brecht believed this

belonged to the theatre of realism (which he loathed).

When Brecht began working full time in theatre (1921), 19th century naturalism was under challenge by:

Experiments in expressionism

Constructivism

Machine made theatre elements and architecture

Attempts to explore cinematic technique and montage

Attempts to remake theatre into a socially and politically challenging force

Erwin Piscator, a theatre contemporary of Brecht said:

Epic theatre…was born out of necessity…It was born in the street…in the turmoil of a city impoverished by war and inflation…If theatre has any meaning in our time at all, its purpose should be to teach us of human relations, behaviour, human capacities. It sacrifices atmosphere, emotion, characterisation, poetry and above all, magic, for the sake of a mutual exchange of problems and experiences with the audience.

V-Effect

German word verfremdungseffekt.Correct translation - ‘to make strange’ (to make

actions strange, or to make the familiar strange).Misleading translation: ‘alienation-effect’.Realistic theatre: also known as ‘dramatic

theatre’.Realism and naturalism dominated the great

stages of the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Gestus

The term gestus first appeared in a theatre review Brecht wrote in 1920.

Initially meant body gesture, as opposed to the spoken word.

Later, gestus came to mean the total process of all physical behaviour the actor displays.

Gestus defined a social position; the character’s status and function in society.

Play structureBrecht’s plays were structured episodically –

separate scenes that did not necessarily follow in chronological order – the action could jump forward or back in time.

Scenes were often preceded by a title and brief description; offering an account of the action of the upcoming scene.

This could be read aloud on stage, thus spoiling the dramatic tension and suspense in the scene.

Brecht preferred to call the scenes ‘episodes’ and the audience ‘spectators’.

Play Structure

Brecht often began by writing his plays with no act or episode divisions; these were later added.

Some plays included long and short scenes.

Short episodes commented upon the action around them, often reinforcing themes and including the songs.

Historification

Brecht’s plays were sometimes set in the past in order to place the present in perspective.

Greek Philosopher Aristotle believed the action of a play must occur in a single location over the course of a single day. Aristotle’s model of the ‘three unities’ of time, place and action was crushed by Brecht.

The Life of Galileo spans 32 years and many settings. Mother Courage and her Children is set in the midst of

the Thirty Years War (1618-48).

Historification

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is set in 1930’s Chicago in a greengrocer trade setting, but the main character represents Hitler and the play is really about the atrocities of 1930s Germany.

The society is the play’s focus, not the characters.

The spectator is asked to critically observe the society portrayed in the play and compare it with his/her own world > inspired to make change.

Why was historification important to Brecht?

Brecht's idea was to make a common everyday event special and thus open to questioning and criticism such that it "provides a key to the whole social structure of a particular transitory period.

The use of props and background imagery, he was able to simultaneously show the audience the various social conditions or various contradictory evidence that might support or vilify a character's actions.

Cont…

He wanted to highlight the environment and conditions within which a certain character had taken a course of action and thus provide the historical context within which such actions were taken.

He also wanted the audience to decide for themselves the validity and justifications for such events. It is this critical questioning of issues that was most important to him

How could you use Brechtian Conventions?

Extreme Beauty - How could you present this issue?

Political

Social

There is always two sides to a coin.

What techniques would you use to stimulate your audience to think?

What message do you want to convey or what controversial question do you want to ask?

Historification

What evidence is there of events in world history where a people have changed their natural looks to submit to a social convention?

What evidence of this exists in society now?

Outline a story that could show the connection between what happened to people in another time and/or culture and a similar social ‘beauty’ extreme in the world now.