A bullet-pointed and concise summary of everything you need to know about Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre as a drama student. Includes origins, staging, performance style and other conventions of Epic Theatre as well as background to Bertolt Brecht and comparisons to other types of theatre
Chloë van Beukering Dramatic Arts Notes: Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
- Born 10 February 1989 in Augsburg
- ‘God is dead’
- Nazi Germany
- Extreme Marxist
- In exile in France, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, America and Switzerland: anti-Hitler theatre
- The Berliner Ensemble
- A German poet, playwright and theatrical reformer, one of the most prominent figures in the
20th century theatre
- Concerned with encouraging audiences to ‘ThInK’ rather than becoming too involved in the
storyline and identifying emotionally with the characters
- Developed the alienation effects to achieve this distancing
- Developed a form of drama called Epic Theatre in which ideas or didactic lessons are important
- Detested the “Aristotelian” drama and its attempts to lure the spectator into a kind of trance-
like state, a total identification with the hero to the point of self-oblivion, resulting in an
emotional catharsis
- Despised the theatre of Realism and didn’t want his audience to feel emotions
- Convinced that theatre must be an agent of social and political change, he sought a suitable
form of theatre
- Having found it he described it as “Epic theatre”
- Took an antagonistic stance against the theatrical norms of the time (Ibsen, Chekhov,
Stanislavski, Strindberg etc.), the pioneers of ‘Absolute Naturalism’
- Accomplished this through his V-effekt, thus promoting critical thinking about theatre
performances
- His intent was to “shatter all illusion” and prevent the audience members from being caught up
in the performances and swept away by the story, the actors or the naturalistic devices on stage
Epic Theatre
- Brecht’s objection to ‘Aristotelian’ theatre was an objection to:
- Catharsis by terror and pity
- Identification with the actors
- Illusion — the attempt to represent the present event
- Brecht’s idea of epic is informed by the ideas of Goethe and Schiller regarding the mood and
character of epic poetry — this is rational, calm detachment, to which Brecht aspires as a
playwright
- Criticised what he called ‘Culinary theatre’
- This is theatre that merely gives an experience, mental refreshment, as a meal is a bodily
restorative
- Dramatic theatre presents events:
- From the hero’s viewpoint (distorting judgement)
- As happening now (preventing calm detachment)
- To counter this, the audience must be made aware that events are not present, but past
events being represented as a narrative, with commentary provided to encourage our own
reflection
- His plays tend to be episodic, written as a seemingly disconnected, open-ended montage of
scenes presented in a non-naturalistic, non-chronological way
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, Chloë van Beukering Dramatic Arts Notes: Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre
- Epic Theatre presents a sequence of incidents or events that are narrated on a grand scale
without the restriction of time, place or formal plot
The Writing of an Epic Play
- Comprises many short scenes or episodes, rather than being divided into long acts
- Each scene was preceded by a written title
- Each scene is autonomous i.e. can stand on its own and still have meaning
- Scenes could comprise dialogue between characters, narration by a separate narrator or by
an actor stepping out of his character, a song or parable which interrupts the action
- Characters considerably over-simplified
- Actor wasn’t expected to become the character, but rather to present the behaviour of the
character in a certain situation
- Characters often referred to by a common name such as ‘farmer’, ‘priest’, ‘soldier’ in order to
reinforce the idea that characters represent a social group rather than have individual
importance
- More concerned with social relationships and the action of characters in a given situation
than with the psychological motivations of the characters
- Believed action didn’t exist to display character, but that characters existed to demonstrate
social action
- The language used also clearly defined the social status of the character
- Brecht used irony extensively to convey his feelings towards certain characters and situations
- The structure of the play also encouraged distancing as it didn’t present a realistic
representation
- Audience constantly reminded they were watching a play
The Alienation Effect
- The action must continually be made strange, alien, remote and separate
- Brecht’s explanation of the V-effekt:
- A child whose mother remarries, seeing her as wife not just mother, or whose teacher is
prosecuted, seeing him in relation to criminal law, experiences a V-effekt
- Brecht coined the German term Verfremdungseffek to label an approach to theatre that
discouraged involving the audience in an illusory narrative world and in the emotions of the
characters
Alienation is achieved through the use of:
- Placards to reveal the events of each scene
- Juxtaposition
- Speaking the stage directions out loud
- Actors addressing the audience directly
- The musicians were placed in full view of the audience
- Actors changing characters and costume on stage
- The use of narration, simple props and scenery
- Exaggerated, unnatural stage lighting
- Several songs used to underscore the themes
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