Bertolt Brecht
PLAYWRIGHT
DIRECTOR
THEORIST
PRACTITIONER
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“Brecht’s work is the most significant
and original in European Drama
since Ibsen and Strindberg”
Raymond Williams
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Contents
Background
Epic Theatre
V-effect
Acting and Other stagecraft
Historification
Playwriting structure (form)
Dramatic vs Epic (theory)
Realism vs Non-Realism (practice)
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Overview
 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.
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The Influence of Expressionism
 Brecht 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.
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Origins of 'Epic Theatre'
 Brecht probably didn’t coin ‘epic’, instead possibly
borrowing it from the great epic poems of literature.
 Alternatively, Hans Egon Holthusen claims Brecht first
heard the term ‘epic theatre’ being used in Berlin in 1924
where it was already being used in ‘certain revolutionary
experiments on the stage’.
 Others claim Erwin Piscator (who collaborated with
Brecht on various projects) first coined ‘epic theatre’.
 Brecht may have employed several of Piscator’s staging
techniques, only later to develop them as his own ideas.
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 Brecht and Piscator finally parted ways because Brecht
believed the only way to achieve social change through
the theatre was to present no emotion in performances.
Piscator disagreed and believed some degree of
emotion was necessary.
 Critics argue the term ‘alienation effect’ is not the best
translation of the German word ‘verfremdungseffekt.
 Holthusen notes Brecht borrowed the concept from the
Russian Formalism movement and the term was really a
translation of the Russian word ‘ostrannenie’, where on a
trip to Moscow in 1935 ‘the word must have…struck him
as a brilliant definition of his own favorite idea’
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Timeline
 1921: arrived Berlin, writing several more plays over the
next decade.
 1926: embraced Marxism.
 1933: Hitler came to power.
 Under Hilter’s rule, experimentation in the arts was
stifled and dramatists either produced plays about an allpowerful Nazi world, suddenly became silent or left the
country.
 Freedom of speech was severely disrupted.
 Brecht exiled himself to Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden
and Finland.
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Timeline
 1941: sails to USA and settles in Santa Monica, CA.
 1947: questioned before the House Committee on
Unamerican Activities.
 US Government suspicious of his alliance with
communism in their country.
 1948: returns to Germany on an Austrian passport.
 Establishes the Berliner Ensemble; soon to become one
of the great theatre companies of Europe.
 Brecht was a perfectionist who painstakingly re-wrote
scenes from some of his plays and then used his theatre
company to perfect his theories.
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Epic Theatre
 Events are telescoped 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.
 Brecht himself also remained detached from the story.
 He called his drama a ‘theatre for the scientific age’.
 Brecht’s plays were didactic and his was a social activist
theatre, asking the spectator to create social and political
change in the outside world.
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Epic Theatre
 The Good Woman of Setzuan 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).
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The stage began to tell a story. The narrator
was no longer missing…the stage began to
be instructive. The theatre became an affair
for philosophers, but only for such
philosophers as wished not just to explain
but also to change the world.
Bertolt Brecht
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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.
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V-effect
 Brecht called the realistic theatre ‘a branch of the
narcotics business’.
 He believed realism was like a drug in that, largely
through the use of emotion, it pacified the spectator,
incapacitating his ability to achieve social change.
 So Brecht’s acting and staging techniques suitably
distanced the spectator from the action.
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“It was the actor’s task to put himself
at a distance from the character he
was portraying and the situation he
was involved with, in order to arouse
a thinking, enquiring response in
the spectator”
J. L Styan
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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.
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Actor
 To show rather than imitate.
 Demonstrate at arm’s length (somewhat simplified and
stereotypical).
 Gesture consciously indicates inner feeling.
 Actor visibly observing own movements.
 Actor allowed to directly address the audience
(considered strong).
 Previous use of the aside (considered weak).
 Few Brechtian characters gain audience empathy.
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Actor
 Brecht’s essay The Street Scene summarises his acting
theories.
 A person who witnesses a traffic accident merely
reenacts the events (a demonstration) in a
nonemotional manner, in order to tell others.
 This person deliberately does not re-enact a perfect
imitation of the event, for this would be ‘art’ and the
demonstration encourages a logical detached view of the
situation for the observer.
 In rehearsal, Brecht often encouraged his actors to
precede their lines with ‘he said…’ in order to remain
objective about their role.
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Set Design
 Dispensed with illusion and symbolism.
 No suggestion of a ‘fourth wall’ and only a half curtain or
none at all (if so, strung on a string across the stage),
thus enabling the actor and spectator to share the same
space.
 Sometimes a bare stage; often only props, resulting in
an open space on which to tell a story.
 Sometimes the stage had sets that incorporated
treadmills, machinery, projection and ramps.
 Brecht was influenced by Piscator (the first to use
projection) and Meyerhold (constructivist set designs).
 Set changes in full view of the audience.
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Playwright
 Brecht’s plays were structured episodically.
 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’.
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Director
 Groupings of actors on stage were positioned specifically
to clarify the human relationships in the play.
 This was functional rather than serving an aesthetic
purpose.
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Lighting
 Lighting equipment deliberately visible to the audience in
order to remind the spectators they were in a theatre.
 Stage covered with plain (open) white light so the actor
would seem to be in the same world as the audience.
 Coloured light would merely assist in the atmosphere of
illusion and evoke emotions.
 Yet again, the division between the stage and audience
areas were broken down.
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Music
 Music and song were used to express the ideas of the
play’s theme independently (unlike opera, where the
music reinforces the text).
 Music and song were often at odds with what was
happening on stage at the time.
 Music was used to neutralise emotion rather than
intensify it.
 The purpose of songs in Brecht’s plays was to reinforce
themes, shock the audience with an unexpected.
technique and momentarily break the increasing
dramatic tension.
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‘Brecht considerably oversimplifies
characters, for he is principally
concerned with social relationships.
He is not interested in total personalities
or the inner lives of his characters’
Oscar Brockett
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Historification
 Brecht’s plays were sometimes set in the past in
order to place the present in perspective.
 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).
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Historification
 The Good Woman of Setzuan detaches the spectator
emotionally by being set in pre-Communist China.
 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.
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PLAYWRITING STRUCTURE
(FORM)
 Brecht often began by writing his plays with no act or
episode divisions; these were later added.
 Act divisions denoting interval at the theatre did not exist.
 Some plays included long and short scenes.
 Long episodes involved most of the stage action crucial
to the plot.
 Short episodes commented upon the action around
them, often reinforcing themes and including the songs.
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‘The audience should never be
allowed to confuse what it sees on
stage with reality. Rather, the play
must always be thought of as a
comment upon life - something to be
watched and judged critically’
Oscar Brockett
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DRAMATIC
 plot
 involves spectator in the
stage situation
 wears down the
spectator’s power of
action
 communicates
experiences
vs.
EPIC
 narrative
 turns the spectator into
an observer
 arouses the spectator’s
power of action
 communicates aspects
of knowledge
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DRAMATIC
 the human being is taken
for granted
 he is unalterable
 one scene makes another
vs.
EPIC
 the human being is the
object of enquiry
 he is alterable and able to
alter
 each scene exists for
itself (episodes)
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DRAMATIC
vs.
EPIC
 linear plot development
 in curves
 focus is on the characters
in the play
 plot conclusion is
paramount
 focus is on the type of
society portrayed
 the process is most
important, not
necessarily the end
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REALISM
vs. NON-REALISM
 illusion of reality on stage
 characters fully-rounded,
life-like, believable
 lots of emotion between
characters
 remind the audience they
are watching a play
 most characters are onedimensional, stereotyped
 limited emotion
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REALISM
vs. NON-REALISM
 audience undergoes a
largely emotional
response to the play
 characters talk to each
other
 actor fully accepts and
becomes character
 audience undergoes a
scientific, intellectual
response to the issues of
the play
 characters can directly
address audience
 actor merely identifies
with role
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REALISM
vs. NON-REALISM
 actor plays one role
 narrator doesn’t exist
 costumes complete,
historically accurate
 sets/props detailed,
complete, authentic
 actor can swap
characters/dual roles
 narrator a key factor
 costumes incomplete
(fragmentary), lack detail
for identification
 sets/props fragmentary
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REALISM
vs. NON-REALISM
 masks unacceptable
 lights hidden to create
the illusion of reality
 set changes and stagehands in darkness
 stage curtain is an
essential tool to hide
scene changes and
denote interval/end
 occasional mask use
 stage lighting in full view
of audience
 set changes and stage
hands in full view
 little or no use of stage
curtain
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REALISM
vs. NON-REALISM
 projection rarely used
 no signs or placards
 employing plot synopsis
would ruin suspense
and dramatic tension in
the play
 projection is common
 placards and signs
frequently used
 plot synopsis
deliberately employed
at the beginning of
scenes to spoil the
suspense
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bial/Martin (Ed.): Brecht Sourcebook

Brecht, Bertolt: Mother Courage and her Children

Brecht, Bertolt: The Good Woman of Setzuan

Brecht, Bertolt: The Life of Galileo

Brecht, Bertolt: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Brockett, Oscar: History of the Theatre

Brockett, Oscar: The Essential Theatre

Brockett, Oscar: The Theatre: An Introduction

Burton, Bruce: Living Drama

Demetz, Peter: Brecht: A Collection of Critical Essays

Huxley/Witts: The Twentieth Century Performance Reader

Sacks/Thompson: The Cambridge Companion to Brecht

Styan, J.L.: Modern Drama in Theory and Practice 3: Expressionism and Epic Theatre

Thoss, Michael: Brecht for Beginners

Williams, Raymond: Drama from Ibsen to Brecht
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