Bertolt Brecht, one of the most important German playwrights, theater theorist, film writer and poets of the 20th century, died on August 14, 1956, after a stroke in Berlin. A new study found that the famous German playwright, has died of a heart attack, but as the result of previously unknown diseases in his childhood. Insight into medical reports, Professor Steven Parker of the University of Manchester, discovered that Brecht was suffering from a rheumatic fever in his childhood that attacked his heart and neurological system and led to chronic heart damage. Rheumatic fever was a poorly explored disease at the beginning of the 20th century, making the future poet and theater director simply declared a nervous child with an enlarged heart muscle. "Brecht was pretty ill, and his chronic illness eventually killed him," says Professor Parker.

Brecht was born on February 10, 1898 in a bourgeois family in Augsburg, Bavaria. During his studies, he wrote his first articles in 1919, and published the first drama "Baal". Protesting against injustice of contemporary civilization, Brecht begins with a complete anarchist rebellion, to later adopt the Marxist view of the world, with which his entire social satire is strongly colored.

John Fuegi paints a picture of Brecht's mindset during early production of ''Baal'':
"Typical of Brecht's working method in Leipzig, and indeed of what was to become a lifetime practice, were his individual sessions with actors outside the formal rehearsal period and his disregard for the original text of the play. Each day the text would be viewed afresh as Brecht the director denounced (half in jest but half seriously) Brecht the playwright. "How could anybody write such shit?" he would ask rhetorically, and would scribble new lines, new scenes, new acts and insist these be learned immediately.

So changing would the chameleon be, that Brecht the theorist would openly fight with Brecht the director, Brecht the poet, Brecht the playwright and Brecht the blatant womanizer. No one could predict which Brecht would predominate at any given moment. But somehow, out of the cacophony of the Brechts arguing with one another would come a production that worked as a unified artistic whole as each contributed a valuable piece to the final mosaic" (Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, According to Plan).

He goes on to describe the overall atmosphere of the production, saying "At the first run through of Baal (and this would be the case in virtually all subsequent Brecht productions) chaos reigned. Totally swept up by the brutal Bohemian atmosphere of the play, the cast behaved as if they all were drunk. Many in fact were drunk and liquor bottles piled up in every corner backstage."



EPIC THEATER

That period of his life came to an end in 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany. Brecht fled and during this period the Nazis formally removed his citizenship, so he was a stateless citizen.

As an artist, Brecht was influenced by a diverse range of writers and practitioners including Chinese theatre and Karl Marx. The turmoil of the times through which Brecht lived gave him a strong political voice. The opposition he faced is testament to the fact that he had the courage to express his personal voice in the world of the theatre. He also had an original and inspired talent to bring out a dynamic theatrical style to express his views. (2)

When naturalistic theatre was at its height and acted as a mirror to what was happening in society, he decided to use it as a force for change. He wanted to make his audience think and famously said that theatre audiences at that time “hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”.

In naturalistic or dramatic theatre the audience care about the lives of the characters onstage. They forget their own lives for a while and escape into the lives of others. When an audience cries for a character or feels emotion through the events happening to them it’s called catharsis.

Brecht was against cathartic theatre. He believed that while the audience believed in the action onstage and became emotionally involved they lost the ability to think and to judge. He wanted his audiences to remain objective and distant from emotional involvement so that they could make considered and rational judgements about any social comment or issues in his work. To do this he used a range of theatrical devices or techniques so that the audience were reminded throughout that they were watching theatre; a presentation of life, not real life itself. His kind of theatre was called Epic theatre. He called the act of distancing the audience from emotional involvement the verfremdungseffekt. (2)

''Art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it.''

-Bertolt Brecht



The first part of the article is translation from Serbian to English from Pulse article ''Bertolt Breht''
(1) theatre database /20th century/ bertolt brecht
(2) BBC, Bertolt Brecht – a brief background

Epic Theatre Conventions
(taken from thedramateacher)

Theory

• Brecht loathed the theatre of realism
• he likened the realistic theatre to the effects of a drug, in that a realistic performance pacified its audience
• Brecht’s plays were didactic and aimed to teach or instruct their audience
• Brecht used the term ‘Lehrstück’, meaning ‘learning-play’
• social activist theatre wanting the spectators to make change in their own world outside the theatre walls
• in 1926 Brecht embraced Marxism and his theatre techniques after this point served his Marxist beliefs
• Brecht’s umbrella title for a range of non-realistic techniques is ‘verfremdungseffekt’
• verfremdungseffekt, or  V-effekt (German) /  A-effect (English), short for ‘alienation-effect’
• misleadingly translated over the decades as ‘distancing effect’
• recent and more accepted translation is ‘to make the familiar, strange’ or ‘estrangement’
• ‘epic’ borrowed from the great poems of literature (The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Mahabharata, Ramayana)
• Brecht was influenced by (German) expressionism and had an interest in the cabaret scene in Berlin

Form

• Brecht wrote over fifty plays
• Brecht’s form of theatre was known as ‘epic theatre’, most likely coined by collaborator Erwin Piscator
• some scholars argue the term ‘epic theatre’ was already in use in European experimental theatre
• epic plays employed a large narrative (as opposed to a smaller plot), spanning many locations and time frames
• Brecht called scenes ‘episodes’, with each scene being relatively self-contained in the story
• epic plays used non-linear, fractured plots, where the events of an episode were not necessarily a result of the preceding episode
• this juxtaposition of scenes employing multiple locations and time frames created a montage effect
• he used his acting troupe at the Berliner Ensemble to perfect his theories on acting and the theatre
• some of his plays were historical, chronicling the life of a person (Life of Galileo, Saint Joan of the Stockyards)
• focus was always on the society being presented in the play, not individual characters
• events in plays were sometimes told from the viewpoint of a single storyteller (alienation device)
• Brecht wrote his plays with no act or scene divisions; these were added later
• long scenes told the main events of the story and were interspersed with occasional short(er) scenes
• short(er) scenes normally involved parables, used to emotionally detach the audience marginally
• parable scenes often involved the use of song, an alienation device employed by Brecht to help deliver the (Marxist) message of the play
• ‘historification’/’historicisation’ was a Brecht term defining the technique of setting the action of a play in the past to draw parallels with contemporary events
• ‘historification’/’historicisation’ enabled spectators to view the events of the play with emotional detachment and garner a thinking response
• Brecht crushed Aristotle’s model of the three unites of time, place and action (one location, single day)

Movement & Gesture

• mix of realistic and non-realistic movement
• movement was at times graceful, but at other times forceful
• Brecht used the Latin word ‘gestus’ to describe both individual gestures and whole body postures
• character gestus denoted one’s social attitude and human relationships with others (linked to Marxist principles)
• some Oriental gesture used (Brecht’s influence of a Balinese dance showing)
• groups of characters often positioned on the stage for functional and not aesthetic reasons
• characters grouped according to their social relationships in the play (Marxist)

Space & Actor Audience Relationship

• Brecht’s plays were performed in traditional proscenium arch theatre houses
• however, the stage curtain was often dispensed with or a half curtain used instead of a full one
• Brecht preferred to call the audience ‘spectators’
• direct address by actors/characters to audience was a strong and unconventional technique used by performers
• direct address broke the (invisible) ‘fourth wall’ and crushed traditional realistic/naturalistic conventions
• the narrator was a common figure in Brechtian dramas (Brecht was probably the father of the modern narrator)

Stagecraft

• costume was not individually identifiable eg. the farmer’s costume represented ‘a (typical) farmer’
• costume was sometimes incomplete and fragmentary eg. tie and briefcase for the businessman
• costume often denoted the character’s role or function in society (plus wealth/class)
• sets were sometimes non-existent or fragmentary (either partial sets or one object representing many of the same)
• at other times sets were industrial eg. ramps, treadmills (influence of Meyerhold’s constructivist set design)
• some makeup and mask use, but non-realistic and ‘theatrical’ eg. grotesque and/or caricatured
• makeup and costume used to depict a character’s social role in the play, not that of his/her everyday appearance
• signs/placards used to show audience a range of information
• screen projection used to reinforce play’s theme/s (to garner an intellectual response, not emotional)
• open white light only (as colour would generate an emotional response from the audience)
• if the house lights were left on during a performance, open white light also allowed for the spectators and performers to share a single same-lit space
• lighting instruments in full view of audience (no attempt to hide them, but rather remind the audience they were watching a play)
• music and song used to express the play’s themes independent of the main spoken text in the play (in parable scenes)
• music was used to neutralise emotion, rather than intensify it (opposite to a modern-day musical)

Acting and Characterisation

• actor was never to fully become the character, as in the realistic/naturalistic theatre
• actor was asked to demonstrate the character at arm’s length with a sense of detachment
• often characters tended to be somewhat oversimplified and stereotyped
• yet other characters were sometimes complex
• historical, real-life characters in some Brecht plays

EXTERNAL LINKS

An introduction to Brechtian theatre

Brecht and the Alienation Effect

To Those Born After

To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn't care for much for love
And for nature's beauties I had little patience.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
II
You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:
Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.
Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.
And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.

Bertolt Brecht