All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. -- Samuel Beckett
* 2002: Instead of "Galileo" -- "Mother Courage" & 2003: 3 P Opera
* Brecht formed a writing collective which became prolific and very influential. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Ruth Berlau and others worked with Brecht and produced the multiple Lehrst¨¹cke (teaching plays), which attempted a new dramaturgy for participants rather than passive audiences. These addressed themselves to the massive worker arts organisation that existed in Germany and Austria in the 1920s. So did his first great play, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which attempted to portray the drama in financial transactions. He also worked in the theaters of Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator.
Reread Aristotle on Dramatic and Epic Poetry: epic - novel - film. Anti-tragic in principle (cyclical and evolutionary models of time).
* References to Brecht and Epic Theatre are in many places (acting, directing and even film).
Summary
Epic theatre of Brecht :
Although Bertolt Brecht's first plays were written in Germany during the 1920s, he was not widely known until much later. Eventually his theories of stage presentation exerted more influence on the course of mid-century theatre in the West than did those of any other individual. This was largely because he proposed the major alternative to the Stanislavsky-oriented realism that dominated acting and the "well-made play" construction that dominated playwriting.
Brecht's earliest work was heavily influenced by German Expressionism, but it was his preoccupation with Marxism and the idea that man and society could be intellectually analyzed that led him to develop his theory of "epic theatre." Brecht believed that theatre should appeal not to the spectator's feelings but to his reason. While still providing entertainment, it should be strongly didactic and capable of provoking social change. In the Realistic theatre of illusion, he argued, the spectator tended to identify with the characters on stage and become emotionally involved with them rather than being stirred to think about his own life. To encourage the audience to adopt a more critical attitude to what was happening on stage, Brecht developed his Verfremdungs-effekt ("alienation effect")--i.e., the use of anti-illusive techniques to remind the spectators that they are in a theatre watching an enactment of reality instead of reality itself. Such techniques included flooding the stage with harsh white light, regardless of where the action was taking place, and leaving the stage lamps in full view of the audience; making use of minimal props and "indicative" scenery; intentionally interrupting the action at key junctures with songs in order to drive home an important point or message; and projecting explanatory captions onto a screen or employing placards. From his actors Brecht demanded not realism and identification with the role but an objective style of playing, to become in a sense detached observers.
Brecht's most important plays, which included Leben des Galilei (The Life of Galileo), Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children), and Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan, or The Good Woman of Setzwan), were written between 1937 and 1945 when he was in exile from the Nazi regime, first in Scandinavia and then in the United States. At the invitation of the newly formed East German government, he returned to found the Berliner Ensemble in 1949 with his wife, Helene Weigel, as leading actress. It was only at this point, through his own productions of his plays, that Brecht earned his reputation as one of the most important figures of 20th-century theatre.
Certainly Brecht's attack on the illusive theatre influenced, directly or indirectly, the theatre of every Western country. In Britain the effect became evident in the work of such playwrights as John Arden and Edward Bond and in some of the bare-stage productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Western theatre in the 20th century, however, has proved to be a cross-fertilization of many styles (Brecht himself acknowledged a debt to traditional Oriental theatre), and by the 1950s other approaches were gaining influence.
[Copyright (c) 1995 Encyclopaedia Britannica]
Reaction to Film (Pop) Culture:
Brecht: We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
Read Casebook on Brecht (textbook)!
"Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction" 1935-1936
Epic Theatre and New Drama:
Thoughts v. Feelings
A-Effect (The Interruption): the alienation that is necessary to all understanding"!
To encourage the audience to adopt a more critical attitude to what was happening on stage, Brecht developed his Verfremdungs-effekt ("alienation effect")--i.e., the use of anti-illusive techniques to remind the spectators that they are in a theatre watching an enactment of reality instead of reality itself. Such techniques included flooding the stage with harsh white light, regardless of where the action was taking place, and leaving the stage lamps in full view of the audience; making use of minimal props and "indicative" scenery; intentionally interrupting the action at key junctures with songs in order to drive home an important point or message; and projecting explanatory captions onto a screen or employing placards.
Notes to "Galileo": "Wish is Father to the Thought" (405)
Walter Benjamin (417) What is Epic Theatre (1939)
"The untragic hero": dispassionate observer or "thinker" (non-Aristotelian). Who is a hero?
The didactic play (define)
"The actor must show his subject, and he must show himself."
Detachment: "What the spectator, anyway the experienced spectator, enjoys about art is the making art, the active creative element in art we view nature herself as if she were an artist." Brecht 401
"The quotable gesture" & biomechanics
Questions
A-Effect: Define the Verfremdungseffekt, the alienation or "distanciation" effect. E-Effect (estranging)
Discuss the trope of maternity in Mother Courage. How do various characters conceive of motherhood? What is the role of children in the play? What is the relation between maternity and war?
What is the relation between virtue and allegory in the play?
What is the role of religion in Mother Courage? (Isolate two or three examples for comparison).
1. Brecht advised his actors to "demonstrate the character" to an audience. Discuss what Brecht meant by this and how he expected it to be achieved.
2. What did Brecht mean by "reality" in the theatre and how did he seek to achieve it through his production methods?
3. All theatre practitioners seek to affect the audience in some way. Compare the means by which Brecht and any one other practitioner hoped to achieve this aim.
4. "Theatre should involve both the emotions and the intellect." Discuss this idea with reference to the work of Brecht and any other theatre practitioners.
5. Show how the working methods of Brecht and any other theatre practitioner might be useful to a director.
[ To myself -- How to connect Acting 121 textbook (Part II. Playing Episodes -- p. 61)? ]
Notes
Allegory and the Morality Play - As the name of its eponymous heroine suggests, Mother Courage poses the tradition of the morality play as its backdrop. Pedagogical in its intent, the morality play is conventionally organized around Everyman as its protagonist and various characters personifying Vices and Virtues. Action consists of their struggle, whether for the Everyman's soul or otherwise. Similarly Mother Courage offers Courage and her children as sense personifications the virtues that do them in during the war: wisdom, bravery, honesty, and kindness. Obviously, it is also profoundly pedagogical in its intentions.
Despite these similarities, it is clear that Brecht fundamentally departs from the morality play tradition as well. Certainly Courage 'explicitly located in her particular socio-historical context as well as the context of the performance' is no Everyman. Moreover, the epic form militates precisely against a structure of ready identification between spectator and character that the universal Everyman clearly establishes. In the morality play, we are all "Everyman." Also, Brecht's play distorts the one-to-one correspondences (e.g. Kattrin is kindness) the morality play poses, exploiting the dissonances and arbitrary relations between the terms of its allegories. In the "Song of the Great Souls of the Earth," which awkwardly uses Socrates to figure for the simpleton Swiss Cheese, the spectator becomes conscious of the structures of figurative language that make these relations possible. By playing on the dissonances between song and action, song and character, the play would again distance the spectator from the spectacle and generate his critical reflection.
Brecht: No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.
Brecht had relations with woman such as Elisabeth Hauptmann, who wrote over 80% of "The Threepenny Opera"...
"Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear -
And he shows them pearly white -
Just a jackknife has Macheath, dear -
And he keeps it out of sight."
(from The Threepenny Opera, 1928)
The term Epic Theater, used by Brecht for the first time in 1926, did not originate with him, although it is generally applied to his work today. It was already in the air in 1924 when Brecht moved from Munich to Berlin and was first used in connection with revolutionary experiments by director Erwin Piscator. Many playwrights and composers produced plays and musical compositions in the 1920s which have been since been labeled epic (Stravinisky, Pirandello, Claudel), and others have followed in their footsteps (Wilder, Miller, Beckett).
* Epic theatre is the theatre which appeals to the audience's reason and intelligence, not emotion contrary to Aristotelian theatre.
* Mother Courage has two characteristics: one is love for her children and the other is attachment to business which is connected to the war: Mother Courage's dilemma is the fact that the war kills her children while it helps her business.
* Theatre of Ideas (concepts)
* Brecht confessed that he failed in clarifying that the epic theatre is not the category of aesthetical form but social category...
"Perhaps, the audience's judgement of her [Mother Courage] is softened by the play's overall impression that the world is a place in which human illusions are gradually eroded through a series of 'little capitulation' to circumstances," Oscar. G. Brocket et al, p.422.
"She [Mother Courage] never connects the loss of her children with the life she has made them lead, and indeed declares that she has taken up her trade for the sake of her children," Oscar. G. Brocket et al, p. 422.
"...Brecht's own intention that she [Mother Courage]be viewed unsympathetically because of her complicity in the war and the deaths of the children," Oscar. G. Brocket et al, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama since 1870.
* Brecht affected many playwrights and drama directors - on modern English drama and the theatre of the absurd.
Brecht:
... This is no place to explain how the opposition of epic and dramatic lost its rigidity after having long been held to be irreconcilable. Let us just point out that the technical advances alone were enough to permit the stage to incorporate an element of narrative in its dramatic productions. The possibility of projections, the greater adaptability of the stage due to mechanization, the film, all completed the theater's equipment, and did so at a point where the most important transactions between people could no longer be shown simply by personifying the motive forces or subjecting the characters to invisible metaphysical powers.
To make these transactions intelligible, the environment in which the people lived had to be brought to bear in a big and "significant" way. This environment had of course been shown in the existing drama, but only as seen from the central figure's point of view, and not as an independent element. It was defined by the hero's reactions to it.
The stage began to tell a story. The narrator was no longer missing, along with the fourth wall. Not only did the background adopt an attitude to the events on the stage--by big screens recalling other simultaneous events elsewhere, by projecting documents which confirmed or contradicted what the characters said, by concrete and intelligible figures to accompany abstract conversations, by figures and sentences to support mimed transactions whose sense was unclear--but the actors too refrained from going over wholly into their role, remaining detached from the character they were playing and clearly inviting criticism of him.
The spectator was no longer in any way allowed to submit to an experience uncritically (and without practical consequences) by means of simple empathy with the chracters in a play. The production took the subject matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding. When something seems "the most obvious thing in the world" it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.
What is "natural" must have the force of what is startling. This is the only way to expose the laws of cause and effect. People's activity must simultaneously be so and be capable of being different.
It was all a great change.
The dramatic theater's spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too-- Just like me--It's only natural-- It'll never change--The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable--That's great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world--I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.
The epic theater's spectator says: I'd never have thought it -- That's not the way -- That's extraordinary, hardly believable -- It's got to stop -- The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary -- That's great art; nothing obvious in it -- I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.
Acting --
Brecht describes his theory fully (Brecht on Theatre, section 31): the actor is to show not to be; Esslin calls this ¡°acting in quotation marks¡±.
Distantation --
A fairly accurate, if not very idiomatic, translation of ¡°Verfremdung¡± .
Expressionism --
A kind of theatre developed by August Strindberg as a way of expressing states of mind. It uses symbolism, unrealistic speech and non-naturalistic sequences of time, place and action. Brecht's early plays have some of these qualities. Its freedom from naturalistic conventions is retained in the Epic theatre.
Fourth wall --
Naturalistic plays purport to depict life precisely as it appears. Thus a typical stage set will look exactly like an ordinary room with one wall (that nearest the viewer) removed - the fourth wall is the missing one; the first three are those we see.
Gestus --
Everything an actor does (in terms of gesture, stance, what we now call "body-language", intonation) in order to show the significance of a scene. Brecht believed that it might be possible eventually to develop a form of dialogue that compelled the actor to display the correct "Gestus". In the meantime, this was to be achieved by the director, and by keeping detailed records (Model Books) of exemplary performances.
Kleines Organon fur das Theater (Little Organon for the Theatre) --
One of Brecht's two extended theoretical works on the theatre. (1948; the original Organon was a work by Aristotle on dialects and logic).
Lehrstucke --
Teaching (or didactic) plays. As the name implies these are not plays to entertain an audience, but to educate actors and audience alike. To involve the audience, it may be required that they participate: in the radio-play Der Ozeanflug the lead rule is to be read (from a script) by each listener at home! What the plays teach is (negatively) the wrongness of bourgeois social morality and (positively) the rightness and inevitability of Marxist morality.
Lighting --
In the Epic theatre the sources of light should be visible at all times, as they are, say, in a boxing ring (Brecht's comparison). Lighting should be uniformly bright; effects of colour and dimming are not to be allowed. This is partly explicable in terms of Brecht's taste for simplicity and austerity, partly in terms of his desire to avoid creating emotional effects.
Model books --
Exemplary productions of "Epic" plays were to be recorded, in minute detail, in every phase. Model books would contain photographs of each stage of production, and copious notes. Five books were published. The plays treated (not only Brecht's) include Galileo, Mother Courage (twice) and The Mother.
Piscator, Erwin --
Marxist playwright and director, originator of political theatre. Piscator and Brecht collaborated on productions, but never of Brecht's own plays. Many of the familiar devices of the epic theatre (captions, statistics, projection of images, musical numbers, narrators) were employed by Piscator and adopted by Brecht. The term "epic drama" was first (in modern times) used of Piscator's production of Fahnen (Flags) by Alfons Paquet. Piscator also gave Brecht the idea of using theatre as an instrument of social change, but in Brecht more artistic and poetic elements appear.
Rehearsal --
In the epic theatre, rehearsal might require presenting a scene from a play other than that to be produced, in order to understand a relationship. Speeches were also, in rehearsal, delivered in the third person with narrative links, or transformed into reported speech, with stage directions also converted into description or narrative. This was supposed to help the actor relax, be aware of the audience - not lost in his character, have muscular control and, eventually, deliver a perfect product.
V-effekt (Abbreviation of Verfremdungseffekt) -- Translated (badly) as "Alienation-effect" and (awkwardly) as "Distantation-effect". More accurately it is "the effect that makes things seem strange or different". The term refers to the use of various devices to make things appear in a new light, so we consider them with intellectual objectivity, robbed of their conventional outward appearance.
Verfremdungseffekt (a)
When something is presented in a strange or surprising manner and we see it afresh, a Verfremdungseffekt has been achieved. Brecht gives the example of a child whose widowed mother remarries, seeing her, for the first time, as a wife. In the plays a V-effekt may be produced by the comment of a chorus figure (the Singer or Wang) or in ordinary dialogue (as in Galileo's "now I must eat": suddenly he is seen not as the great scientific innovator but an ordinary, hungry man).
The Notes on Brecht are not sorted out. Over last ten years I taught his three plays and there are some commentaries on Mother Courage, 3P Opera and Galileo (lost). I wish I could cover "Good Woman"... Of course, the focus is on Theory of Epic Theatre. I never staged Brecht, but I use his ideas in directing. Mostly it's done through Meyerhold's concepts; but I do not have time to write about his influence on Brecht.
I don't know, if I ever get to doing drama textbook, when I can make texts "reader-friendly."
Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Germany, on 10 February, 1898. He started writing and publishing by the age of 16 (news commentary, poems and short stories). And had his first plays published in 1922 at the age of 24. Was married to the famous actress Helene Weigel, who was his life-long companion and co-writer/director. They set up their own company, the state-funded Berliner Ensemble in 1949.
CompareFredric Jameson's Brecht and method (1998): Brecht would have been delighted, I like to think, at an argument, not for his greatness. . . as rather for his usefulness. . . right now . . .
I guess, we have to talk about "episodic acting" as long as we have "Acting for the Camera"! Screenplay is the brechtian episodic structure. Closeups, especially, are a few second of "acting" before the cry "cut"...
Can we use Method's motivation technique? Sure. But very often we won't find the familier Aristotle's composition with exposition, climax and resolution. For the nature of cut and shot you better go to my Film-North pages.
But first the difference between plot and story (see 200X Files for details):
[ ]
"The King died and then the Queen died" is a story.
"The King died and then the Queen died of grief" is a plot (29)
According to the British novelist E.M. Forser (Aspects of the Novel)... Although others think the opposite. Nevertheless, first is the sequence of events (episodes); the Queen died. [ more in intro in biomechanics+ ]
Brecht called his modern theatre the Epic Theatre and this was to be the theatre for the modern, scientific era. It was to be analytical and be primarily concerned with analysing the social relations that determine action in bourgeois society. It was to be the "theatrical style of our time", the dramatic form which corresponded to "the whole radical transformation of the mentality of our time" Brecht 1884, 23). It was not located in an idealised future, but the gritty present where the enemy was the military, the church and the bourgeoisie. It would be a theatre that was addressed to reason rather than empathy and to the common man. For Brecht, the radical transformation was from a nineteenth century bourgeois world view to a twentieth century scientific one, from which perspective the artefacts and philosophical tenets of the past appeared old and in decline. The belief in the progress of history, fuelled by the Marxist notion of the march of history, is evident throughout Brecht¡¯s writing. He is in this sense a man of his times. The modernist belief in progress went something like this ,
This idea of progress as possible, probable or necessary was rooted in the certainty that the development of the arts, technology, knowledge and liberty would be profitable to mankind as a whole. (Lyotard 1986, 6)
From his position on the left of politics, Brecht's dramatic theory reflected this certainty at the same time as it set as its goal, that the proletariat would enjoy the profits of progress. Theatre would be at the forefront of social and political life, the privileged scene of the social life of the period. It would represent the political consciousness of the age and its social conditions. The ideal "conscious experience" for Brecht was class consciousness and he later nominated one of his actors, Ernst Busch, as "the first great characterization on the German stage of a class-conscious proletarian" (Eddershaw 1996, 27) Rather than the classical or romantic hero, the actor would now depict the proletarian subject who was the anti-romantic, comic hero of epic theatre.
[ Sorry, folks. I do not know where the original Brecht page is... ]
Brecht, Film & Biomechanics -- Montage principle. Also, connection to Postmodern -- for 413.
"His theater of alienation intended to motivate the viewer to think. Brecht's postulate of a thinking comportment converges, strangely enough, with the objective discernment that autonomous artworks presupposes in the viewer, listener, or reader as being adequate to them. His didactic style, however, is intolerant of the ambiguity in which thought originates: It is authoritarian. This may have been Brecht's response to the ineffectuality of his didactic plays: As a virtuoso of manipulative technique, he wanted to coerce the desired effect just as he once planned to organize his rise to fame." ( Theodor Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, 1997)
... "theatrical style of our time", the dramatic form which corresponded to "the whole radical transformation of the mentality of our time" (Brecht 1884, 23).
Brecht & Meyerhold
Outside approach, types, spectacle (revolution in theatre -- special lesson?)
Epic Theatre
Reaction to Realism
1998 -- 100 years since birth (short bio and some history).
Brecht, Marxism, Dialectics (Hegel), Ideology (Check Eisenstein, many references to film).
I. THE NEED
Instruction, not Entertainment! "Estranging" (Tolstoy and Shcklovsky) and A-Effect (plus Existentionalism): several ways to create it on stage [detachment of the actor from the character v. method acting's total and constant identification]. A must for any self-reflection, the distance.
Meyerhold and Biomechanics (Theatricality) and theatrical (performative) languages.
"In order to produce A Effects the actor has to discard whatever means he has learned of persuading the audience to identify itself with the characters which he plays. Aiming not to put his audience into a trance, he must not go into a trance himself. His muscles must remain loose, for a turn of the head, e.g., with tautened neck muscles, will "magically" lead the spectators' eyes and even their heads to turn with it, and this can only detract from any speculation or reaction which the gestures may bring about. His way of speaking has to be free from ecclesiastical singsong and from all those cadences which lull the spectator so that the sense gets lost." (from A Short Organum for the Theatre, 1948)
II. REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE. Theory of labor (commodity) and Marx on alienation. The crisis of modernity (humanism), the roots of the postmodern. Not to reflect, but to change the real! Socialism, facism and communism.
The results of social (and inner) revolutions.
III. (SOCIAL) ROLE OF THEATRE
Breaking the 4th Wall. New Spectator. Moral and social choices.
Understanding v. Feelings. Knowledge is power and Empowerment of the low.
Actor as a citizen. Theatre is a social tool.
Different techniques of the narrative structure (composistion). "Filmic Drama"
IV. INDIVIDUAL & SOCIETY
Galileo (and even Mother Courage) are heroes of modernity. Modernism: Character as Plot (simplofied for masses Chekhov?). Never gave any cradit to Shakespeare. Even to the Greeks (chorus).
V. AFTER THE NOW
Germans: Heidegger and after -- from Utopia to Dystopia (late capitalism).
THR413: Read Fredric Jameson "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" (new marxism).
Modern relevance (themes). War and we.
"It [the theatre] constructs its workable representations of society, which are then in a position to influence society. . ." (186) The Weimar Republic - 1919 to 1933.
The spectator was no longer in any way allowed to submit to an experience uncritically (and without practical concequences) by means of simple empathy with the characters in a play...
The dramatic [realistic] theatre's spectator ways: Yes, I have felt like that too -- Just like me -- It's only natural -- It'll never change -- The suffering of this man appall me, because they are inescapable -- That's great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world -- I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.
The epic theatre's spectator says: I'd never have thought it -- That's not the way -- That's extraordinary, hardly believable -- It's got to stop -- The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary -- That's great art: nothing obvious in it -- I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.
Brecht on Theatre
PS
Some applications of the Epic Theatre theory are in Virtual Theatre
Connection between inner and outer conflict (analysis)
Connections with Meyerhold's Theatre Theatrical
If we are to follow the risky tradition of the "plot-oriented," "character-oriented" and "message-oriented" plays, "Mother Courage" is the last.
Take a note how the other two (plot and character) are expressed in the Idea.
Bertolt Brecht about his concept of the Epic Theater:
...This is no place to explain how the opposition of epic and dramatic lost its rigidity after having long been held to be irreconcilable. Let us just point out that the technical advances alone were enough to permit the stage to incorporate an element of narrative in its dramatic productions. The possibility of projections, the greater adaptability of the stage due to mechanization, the film, all completed the theater's equipment, and did so at a point where the most important transactions between people could no longer be shown simply by personifying the motive forces or subjecting the characters to invisible metaphysical powers.
To make these transactions intelligible, the environment in which the people lived had to be brought to bear in a big and "significant" way. This environment had of course been shown in the existing drama, but only as seen from the central figure's point of view, and not as an independent element. It was defined by the hero's reactions to it. .
The stage began to tell a story. The narrator was no longer missing, along with the fourth wall. Not only did the background adopt an attitude to the events on the stage--by big screens recalling other simultaneous events elsewhere, by projecting documents which confirmed or contradicted what the characters said, by concrete and intelligible figures to accompany abstract conversations, by figures and sentences to support mimed transactions whose sense was unclear--but the actors too refrained from going over wholly into their role, remaining detached from the character they were playing and clearly inviting criticism of him.
The spectator was no longer in any way allowed to submit to an experience uncritically (and without practical consequences) by means of simple empathy with the chracters in a play. The production took the subject matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding. When something seems "the most obvious thing in the world" it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.
What is "natural" must have the force of what is startling. This is the only way to expose the laws of cause and effect. People's activity must simultaneously be so and be capable of being different.
It was all a great change.
The dramatic theater's spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too-- Just like me--It's only natural-- It'll never change--The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable--That's great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world--I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.
The epic theater's spectator says: I'd never have thought it -- That's not the way -- That's extraordinary, hardly believable -- It's got to stop -- The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary -- That's great art; nothing obvious in it -- I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.
Brecht, the Epic Theater was supposed to instruct its audience, therefore he also called it the Instructive Theater, and wrote the following about it:
The stage began to be instructive.
Oil, inflation, social struggles, war, the family, religion, wheat, the meat market, all became subjects for theatrical representation. Choruses enlightened the spectator about facts unknown to him. Films showed a montage of events from all over the world. Projections added statistical material. And as the "background" came to the front of the stage, so people's activity was subjected to criticism. Right and wrong courses of action were shown. People were shown who knew what they were doing, and others who did not. The theater became an affair for philosophers, but only for such philosophers as wished not just to explain the world, but also to change it. So we had philosophy and we had instruction. . . .
Homework
For directing class: A Model for Epic Theatre (234) Directors on Directing (textbook 2002)
In act.vtheatre.net, the part II (textbook Fall 2003) "Playing Episodes" very good introduction to Brecht (Epic Theatre). Especially, recommended for directors, if they plan to work with actors in non-Method techniques. Of course, biomechanics webpages are a must.
Fall 2003: The Three-Penny Opera (Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera is infused with this sort of sensibility, as though the highwaymen of John Gay's original Beggar's Opera had been replaced with sea robbers. Brecht and Weill's dingy Thames river is menaced by the brigand Macheath, and their famous song to him, "The Ballad of Mac the Knife," sounds like it is explicity based on sea shanties).
Mack the Knife(M.Blitzen/L.Armstrong/ B.Darin version):
Oh the shark has/ Pretty teeth dear
And he keeps them/ Pearly white
And a jackknife/ Has Macheath dear
and he keeps it/ out of sight
When the shark bites/ with it's teeth dear
scarlet billows/ start to spread
Fancy gloves though/ Wears Macheath dear
So there's not a trace/ of red
On the sidewalk/ Sunday morning
Lies a body/ Oozing life
Someone's sneeking/ Around the cornor
Is that someone/ Mack the knife?
There's a tugboat/ By the river
Cement bags/ drooping down
The cement's/ just for the weight dear
Now that Mackie's/ Back in town
Louie Miller/ Dissappeared dear
After drawing/ Out his cash
And Macheath spends/ Like a sailor
Has our boy done/ Something rash?
Suky Taudry, Jenny Diver, Lotty Lenya, and Lucy Brown
The line forms/ on the right dear
Now that Mackie's/ Back in town
The Ballad of Mac Tonight (McDonald's):
When the clock strikes/ Half past six babe
It's time to head for/ Golden light
It's a good time/ For the great taste
(Dinner) at Mcdonald's/ It's Mac Tonight!
For further reading: Brecht: A Choise of Evils by M. Esslin (1959); Brecht: The Man and His Work by M. Esslin (1959); Bertold Brecht by R. Gray (1961); The Art of Bertold Brecht by W. Weideli (1963); Bertold Brecht by F. Ewen (1967); Bertold Brecht by W. Haas (1968); Understanding Brecht by W. Benjamin (1973); Brecht as they knew him, ed. by H. Witt (1975); Bertold Brecht in America by James K. Lyon (1981); Brecht in Exile by Bruce Cook (1983); Brecht by R. Hayman (1983); Bertold Brecht by J.Speirs (1987); The Poetry of Brecht, by P.J. Thompson (1989); Postmodern Brecht by E. Wright (1989); Brecht by Hans Mayer (1996); Brecht & Co. by John Fuegi (1997); Brecht-Chronik by Klaus V§èlker (1997); Bertold Brecht by G. Berg (1998) - See also: Elias Canetti, Bertold Brecht/Kurt Weil's Alabama Song (Whisky Bar), performed by The Doors
The play opens in the beggar shop owned by Peachum. Peachum has taken control of all the beggars in London and runs a shop that outfits the beggars and provides them with a location to beg in. A young man comes in and asks for a job. Peachum makes the man pay him first and then shows the man the five states of human misery before giving the man a costume to wear.
When Mrs. Peachum arrives he asks her about his daughter Polly. She tells him that Polly has been seeing a gentleman lately. When she describes the man, Peachum realizes that it is none other than Mac the Knife, London's most powerful criminal. He runs upstairs and sees that Polly did not come home that night.
Meanwhile, Polly and Macheath have just broken into a stable where they are getting married. The rest of Mac's gang arrives and they bring in wedding presents. Everything has been stolen, including the stable. Soon the parson arrives and they sit down to eat. Polly provides them with some entertainment by singing a song. After she is done Tiger Brown the Sheriff arrives, but instead of arresting them all he greets Macheath as an old friend. Mac explains that he and Tiger Brown served together in the war and that he has paid Brown kickbacks on every job ever since. After Brown leaves the men present Polly and Macheath a large bed to sleep in and then leave them alone.
Polly returns home to find her parents furious with her for marrying Macheath. She tries to defend the marriage, but they decide to take on Macheath and destroy him. Mr. Peachum tells his wife that he will go to Tiger Brown and make him arrest Macheath. Meanwhile, Mrs. Peachum agrees to go and bribe the whores whom Macheath goes to every week. She is hoping that the whores will turn in Macheath.
Polly goes with her father and watches as Brown agrees to arrest Macheath. She then goes back to the stable where Mac is staying and tries to warn him. He does not believe her until she produces the charges that are being levied against him. Instead of being emotional, Mac focuses on his business. He hands the business over to Polly and tells her what to do. Soon thereafter his gang arrives and Mac informs them that Polly will be their boss while he goes away. Matthew tries to challenge Polly's authority, but she threatens to kill him if he opens his mouth again; the other thieves applaud her and accept her leadership.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Peachum approaches Low-Dive Jenny, a prostitute, and convinces her to turn in Macheath should he be foolish enough to show up at the brothel.
The evening in the brothel one of Mac's men is trying to convince the whores that Macheath would not be so foolish as to show up. However, no sooner does he say this than Mac arrives and sits down. Jenny takes Mac's palm and reads it, warning him that a woman will betray him. He thinks she means Polly. Jenny soon sneaks out while Mac is talking with the whores and gets the police and Mrs. Peachum. Constable Smith enters and tries to arrest Mac, who knocks the man down and jumps out the window. Unfortunately for him, Mrs. Peachum is standing there with the other police officers. They take him away. Jenny wakes up Macheath's man who has fallen asleep while reading and missed the entire scene.
Now in prison, Mac is afraid that Tiger Brown will learn that he has been playing around with Brown's daughter Lucy. She soon arrives and is horrified to see him in jail. To complicate matters further, Polly arrives and also claims Mac as her husband. Both women argue; Lucy indicates that she is pregnant and therefore has a better claim to Mac, but Polly is "legally" married to him and she has papers to prove it. Mac chooses to support Lucy instead of Polly because he is more afraid of Tiger Brown. Mrs. Peachum then arrives and drags Polly away. Lucy, happy to finally be alone with Mac again, hands him his hat and cane and leaves. When Constable Smith returns he tries to get the cane, but Mac is faster than he is and manages to escape. Brown enters the cell and is relieved to see it empty. However, Peachum also arrives and threatens to disrupt the coronation if Brown does not find Macheath and arrest him again immediately.
That night Peachum outfits his beggars with signs and clothes in an effort to ruin the coronation parade the next morning. The whores arrive, led by Jenny, and ask for their reward for turning in Macheath. Peachum refuses to pay them on the grounds that Mac escaped already. Jenny, in a fit of rage, tells them that Mac is a far better man than any of them. She then accidentally reveals that Mac had gone straight to her place and comforted her, and that he is now with another whore named Suky Tawdry. Peachum is elated by this information and promises to give the whores the reward money. He sends one of his beggars to get the police.
Tiger Brown arrives only a few minutes later. Brown has decided that rather than arrest Macheath it would be far easier for him to arrest Peachum and all the beggars, thereby preventing them from ruining the coronation. Peachum merely ignores Brown's threats and points out that there are far more beggars than there are police. He asks Brown point-blank how if would look if several hundred men were clubbed down on the day of the procession. Unable to arrest Peachum, Brown realizes that he is caught in a bind. Peachum then demands that Brown arrest Macheath and gives him the address where Macheath is staying. Peachum lastly send the beggars to the jail rather then that coronation.
Polly goes to visit Lucy in an effort to find out where Mac is. It turns out that neither of them knows his whereabouts, causing Polly to laugh and state that Mac has stood them both up. They soon hear a noise in the hallway and realize that Mac has been rearrested. Mrs. Peachum shows up with widow's clothing and makes Polly change into it.
The next morning, the same day the coronation procession is set for, Macheath is brought out of his cell and locked into a public cell. He is going to be hung at six in the morning, and has only an hour to live. He offers Smith one thousand pounds in cash if Smith will let him escape, but Smith refuses to make any promises. Jake and Matthew arrive and Mac asks them for money; they say that it will be hard to get anything so early in the morning but leave promising to find something. Polly also arrives and tells Mac that his business is going well but that she has no money on her. Brown finally enters the cell as well and he and Macheath settle their accounts (recall that Mac pays Brown kickbacks for helping him). Having failed to get the money, Smith refuses to help Macheath.
Soon thereafter all of the characters return and stand next to the cage. Jake and Matthew apologize for not getting the money in time and tell Mac that all the other crooks are stealing elsewhere. Even the whores have showed up to watch him die. Mac gives a last speech in which he claims all the small crooks are being pushed aside by corporate interests. Peachum then stands up and gives the final speech, arguing that since this is an opera and not real life, they will save Macheath. Brown enters in the form of a mounted messenger and brings a special order from the Queen. She has decided to pardon Macheath and to also elevate him to a hereditary knighthood. Mac rejoices his good luck while Peachum remarks that such a thing would never happen in real life. [ ClassicNotes ]
http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/mothercourage/summ12.html
http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/mothercourage/essays/essay1.html
From Brecht to O'Neill : Europe and America
BRECHT SOURCEBOOK by Carol Martin, Henry Bial Routledge; 1 edition (January 2000) ISBN: 0415200431 * A fascinating anthology that brings together in one volume many of the important articles written about Brecht between 1957 and 1997. The collection explores a wide range of viewpoints about Brecht's theatre theories and practice, as well as including three plays not otherwise easily available in English: The Beggar or the Dead Dog, Baden Lehrstuck and The Seven Deadly Sins of the Lower Middle Class. This unique compendium covers all the key areas including: the development of Brecht's aesthetic theories, the relationship of Epic theatre to orthodox dramatic theatre, Brecht's collaborations with Kurt Weill, Paul Dessau, and Max Frisch, and Brecht's influence on a variety of cultures and contexts including England, Italy, Moscow, and Japan.
Contributors: Lee Baxandall, Eric Bentley, Henry Bial, Hans-Joachim Bunge, Paul Dessau, Martin Esslin, Henry Glade, Barclay Goldsmith, Mordecai Gorelik, Karen Laughlin, Carol Martin, W. Stuart McDowell, Erica Munk, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Schumacher, Diana Taylor, Tadashi Uchino, Carl Weber, and Kurt Weill.
BRECHT: "The urgent revolution of the theatre must start with a transformation of the stage... We do not ask [for] an audience, but a community, not a stage, but a pulpit." (qtd. Brockett, Century, 242)
Based mainly on Marxist ideals, Epic theatre focused on bringing to light social issues regarding the working class. The movement was strongly influenced by expressionism and Germany's Neue Sachlichkeit (German neo-realism). The term "epic" theatre was coined by Bertolt Brecht to contrast the style of theatre he advocated with the Wagner's Aristotelian or "dramatic" theatre.
The Theater of Meyerhold and Brecht by Katherine Bliss Eaton; Greenwood Press, 1985 * 1. BRECHT'S CONTACTS WITH THE THEATER OF MEYERHOLD:
"In 1927 German audiences were entertained by a Soviet agitprop group known as Blue Blouse, the direct descendant of Russian political avant-garde theater. The influence of Blue Blouse on German political ensemble theater was profound." (Eaton 13)
The fame of the German poet-playwright-director-theoretician Bertolt Brecht now surpasses the reputation of his older contemporary, the Russian director and theoretician Vsevolod Meyerhold. Yet this was not always the case. From the early years of the twentieth century until about 1940, Meyerhold was the most famous living theater worker in the West. The two ideas that form the basis of Brecht's theoretical work -- the idea that a dramatic performance should be a fully conscious creation of all concerned (playwright, actors, directors, spectators) and the idea of theater as a force for social betterment -- are found in Meyerhold's letters written in the late 1890s. This is not to say that he was the "inventor" of such concepts. These things were "in the air," as Piscator put it, and of course have a long history. But Meyerhold in his time surpassed his contemporaries in his ability to combine certain esthetic and political ideas and transfer them successfully to the stage. (Eaton 117) [ i -- AA ]
There are also important similarities between Meyerhold's techniques and those of the English director, designer, and theoretician Gordon Craig. Indeed the two men were friends, praised each other's work, and began to formulate their ideas about the same time. (Eaton 118)
Though born in Russia, Meyerhold shared with Brecht the cultural milieu which nurtured German Expressionism. Both were raised in prosperous middle-class German households, supported by fathers who made their living in business, and who (vainly) envisioned for their clever sons a university education which would lead to a respectable remunerative career as doctor or lawyer. As a first-generation Russian born to German parents, Meyerhold was very close to the cultural heritage into which Brecht was born and educated. As a director of Wagnerian opera, he may have known more than Brecht about that aspect of German dramatic art. (Eaton 120)
The lives and careers of the two theater workers continued to intertwine even after their deaths, when Brecht's plays and dramatic theories became the "Trojan horse" 10 by which Meyerholdian ideas were smuggled back into the Soviet Union in the 1950s. In 1964 the Moscow Taganka Theater staged as its first production Brecht The Good Person of Sezuan, under the direction of Iuri Liubimov (who later became an exile in the West). In many ways that production synthesized the best in the currents of the old and the new avant-garde. The actors were products of the Vakhtangov school, a school deeply influenced by both Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. The "inventive and daring" production style was based on nearly forgotten traditions of Meyerholdian theater: the bare stage and brick backstage wall, simple props (student desks) which symbolized a wide variety of objects and settings, fast scene changes, and the use of mime, dance, and music as elements of theatrical montage. But this was not an imitative production. It was both a "restoration" and a "re-interpretation" of the best of Russian experimental theater. [11] The Taganka theater flourished for twenty years, until Liubimov was expelled from his theater and his country. Perhaps Meyerhold's face suddenly became too visible behind the mask of the troublesome, "classic" Brecht. (Eaton 121)
Bertolt Brecht was already an established playwright of international stature when he completed and published his Short Organum in 1948. He was a recognized iconoclast whose plays and theatrical statements took exception to the prevailing theatre of realism. He had advocated in his many observations radical changes in the form and aesthetic of the theatre and, because he was particularly concerned with the manner in which audiences perceived and experienced a play, he was necessarily concerned about acting. His views toward the actor and acting expressed in the Short Organum were met with violent opposition from supporters of the Stanistavsky system, while they were embraced by some who clearly failed to grasp critical aspects of Brecht's admittedly underdeveloped manifesto.
The Short Organum called for a new theatre for a changing world. It was conceived as a result of previous experimentation in the theatre and, like so much of Brecht's writing about the theatre, must be recognized as an attempt to clarify the presentation of his plays. Near the end of his life, he commented on this very point.
Many of my writings about the theatre are, I must observe, misunderstood. I see this especially in letters and articles which claim to agree with me. Then I feel as a mathematician must feel, if he were to read, "I quite agree with you that two times two is five." I believe certain writings of mine have been misunderstood because I took important things for granted instead of formulating them. Most of these writings, if not all, were written as comments upon my plays, so that the plays would be staged correctly. That gives them a dry, craftsmanlike tone, as if a sculptor were writing about how his statues should be exhibited, in what sort of a place, on what sort of a stand--cold-cut direction. Perhaps the readers expected something about the spirit in which the statues were formed: they must exert the effort to extract that from my remarks.
...
Recognizing the need to clarify his position on acting and in an attempt to rectify obvious misunderstandings, Brecht continued to write and speak a great deal more about acting until his death on August 14, 1956.
[ Playwrights and Acting: Acting Methodologies for Brecht, Ionesco, Pinter, and Shepard by James H. McTeague; Greenwood Press, 1994 ]
THE NEXT MAN - Bertolt Brecht Dates - 1898-1956
Key Influences
Karl Marx, Max Reinhardt, Edwin Piscator, Helene Weigel, Elisabeth Hauptmann,
Ruth Berlau, Margarete Steffin
Description/Philosophy
Plays - eposodic, song, projections (take audience out of story moment and put into critical
analysis moment), 3rd person narratives, not about magical illusion - audience sees everything,
audience engagement important - step back, analyze, think about what seen and feelings
We see the playwright - he shows us things and wants our take on it, in the hopes of spuring us
on to political action
Exploring every contradiction in a given moment - use of even discarded effects/outcomes
Deals with power structures, political/social core - plays commenting on this is essential
Things constructed on stage to look like a set - real to theatre life, should look like life in the
theatre, do not take anything for granted because someone created it, value societal collective,
individual not held up to be point of government
The world was made by people- little people- it didn’t have to turn out like it is but individuals
made it that way
Manifesto - A Short Organum for the Theatre - 1948
Plays
Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, Man is Man, The Threepenny Opera, The
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany, The Measures Taken, The Mother, The Seven Deadly
Sins, Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Resistible Rise of Arturo, The
Caucasian Chalk Circle
For Future Reference
Bertolt Brecht Journals - Ed. John Willet
The Cambridge Companion to Brecht - Ed. Thompson, Sacks
Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, According to Plan - John Fuegi
Brecht and Company : Sex, Politics, and the Making of Modern Drama - John Fuegi
Brecht, a Choice of Evils: A Critical Study of the Man, His Work, and His Opinions - Martin
Esslin
* Epic theatre is the theatre which appeals to the audience's reason and intelligence, not emotion contrary to Aristotelian theatre.
The Theater of Meyerhold and Brecht by Katherine Bliss Eaton; Greenwood Press, 1985 * 1. BRECHT'S CONTACTS WITH THE THEATER OF MEYERHOLD:
