Bertolt Brecht

I have been reading about Brecht and his style of theatre and writing.

Bertolt Brecht; born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956) was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production. he operated a post-war theatre company along with his wife called - Berliner Ensemble.

Brecht was a thorough Marxist and formulated a theatre style called "epic theatre" which served as a forum for political ideas. In this respect, he may be seen as having subtly influenced Sergei Eisenstein in his creation of the 'Montage' technique - similarly; using political dialogue and innuendo as the baseline of all his work. Similarly, Picasso's cubist collage is also one of the derivatives of Brecht's ideology. Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties.

One of Brecht's most important principles was what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement effect", and often mistranslated as "alienation effect").This involved, Brecht wrote, "stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them". To this end, Brecht employed techniques such as the actor's direct address to the audience, harsh and bright stage lighting, the use of songs to interrupt the action, explanatory placards, and, in rehearsals, the transposition of text to the third person or past tense, and speaking the stage directions out loud.


Epic Theatre

Epic theatre was a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners, including Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and, most famously, Bertolt Brecht. Although many of the concepts and practices involved in Brechtian epic theatre had been around for years, even centuries, Brecht unified them, developed the style, and popularized it.

Epic theatre incorporates a mode of acting that utilises what he calls gestus. The epic form describes both a type of written drama and a methodological approach to the production of plays. Brecht later preferred the term "dialectical theatre."

One of the goals of epic theatre is for the audience to always be aware that it is watching a play: "It is most important that one of the main features of the ordinary theatre should be excluded from [epic theatre]: the engendering of illusion." {Bertolt, Brecht "Brecht on Theatre", page 122.}

Epic theatre was a reaction against other popular forms of theatre, particularly the naturalistic approach pioneered by Constantin Stanislavski. Like Stanislavski, Brecht disliked the shallow spectacle, manipulative plots, and heightened emotion of melodrama; but where Stanislavski attempted to engender real human behavior in acting through the techniques of Stanislavski's system and to absorb the audience completely in the fictional world of the play, Brecht saw Stanislavski's methodology as producing escapism. Brecht's own social and political focus departed also from surrealism and the Theatre of Cruelty.


Salient features of Brecht's work:

- Real and everyday life
- Concept of 'making strange'
- Create a pensive space
- Collage/montage technique
- Changing 'reality'
- Usability of Art


References

Whybrow, N., 2005. Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin. Bristol: Intellect Books Ltd.

Brecht, B., 1964. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. British edition. London: Methuen