EPIC THEATRE
Bertolt Brecht
PLAYWRIGHT
DIRECTOR
THEORIST
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 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.
Brecht’s Beliefs
His 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 structure
Brecht’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.