Bertolt Brecht

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image source: http://www.brechtsociety.org/
Bertolt Brecht is best known for his plays and poems, in which he embraced anti-bourgeois themes and being forced from his native Germany.
Bertolt Brecht was born February 10, 1898 in Germany, he began writing plays while working at an Army hospital. Brecht’s work fit nicely with the Dadaist and Marxist movement of the time. The increased dissatisfaction with society after World War I fit Brecht’s anti-bourgeois writing. He fled Nazi Germany and settled in the US, until setting in Berlin following World War II. Brecht died in 1956.
http://www.biography.com/people/bertolt-brecht-9225028

Summary

The subject matter

  • Narratives are displaced in time and place
  • Political parables
  • Epic storytelling

The political purpose or message or dramatic intention

  • Heavily influenced by political ideals. Karl Marx
  • To arouse in the audience a need for change
  • To keep an audience thinking

The actor-audience relationship

  • The role of the narrator/chorus. Direct address
  • The isolating of songs as a form of comment
  • The abolition of illusion
  • The audience encouraged to smoke and drink

The staging form adopted

  • The proscenium arch
  • Epic as opposed to dramatic (Aristotelian)
  • Swiftly changing scenes

Directorial interpretation/production style

  • The director as part of a team
  • The use of music to comment on the action
  • Very refined and specific detail
  • Clear and carefully constructed stage pictures

Design elements

  • Realistic selective detail
  • Very well-made props
  • Costumes made to look well worn

Role of actors and performance style

  • The actor in a role not a character
  • The actor as demonstrator
  • The actor as the main source of distancing
  • The use of gestus

Technical elements

  • Hard white light from a visible source
  • The half-curtain
  • The revolve

Audience response

  • To be alerted to the need for change
  • To observe rather than empathise
(p 326-327 Mackey, Sally, and Simon Cooper. Drama and Theatre Studies: For Use with All Drama & Theatre Studies A & AS Specifications. Rev. ed. Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes, 2000)

Andrew Moore’s Excellent Brecht Study Guide

MIT – Epic theatre using the Verfremdungseffekt

The International Brecht Society