Gestus

An extremely prominent technique Brecht encouraged his actors to employ was the use of Gestus. Click here to see a post on gestus.

Brechtian Productions and Techniques

Brecht’s plays in order of production.

·         Drums in the Night (1922)

·         Baal (1923)

·         In the Jungle of the Cities (1923)

·         Edward II (1924)

·         The Elephant Calf (1925)

·         Man Equals Man (1926)

·         The Threepenny Opera (1928)

·         Happy End (1929)

·         Lindbergh's Flight (1929)

·         He Who Says Yes (1929)

·         Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930)

·         He Who Says No (1930)

·         The Measures Taken (1930)

·         The Mother (1932)

·         The Seven Deadly Sins (1933)

·         The Roundheads and the Peakheads (1936)

·         The Exception and the Rule (1936)

·         Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1938)

·         Señora Carrara's Rifles (1937)

·         The Trial of Lucullus (1939)

·         Mother Courage and Her Children (1941)

·         Mr Puntila and His Man Matti (1941)

·         Life of Galileo (1943)

·         The Good Person of Sezuan (1943)

·         Schweik in the Second World War (1944)

·         The Visions of Simone Machard (1944)

·         The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945)

·         The Days of the Commune (1949)

·         The Tutor (1950)

·         The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1958)

·         Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1959)

KEY BRECHTIAN TECHNIQUES:

Signs and banners: Often Brecht would use these to convey messages to audiences. These messages could be names of characters, emotions or commands. A popular one was “STOP BEING SO EMOTIONAL” as he was a strong believer in objective audiences, not passive emotional ones.

Songs and narration: In many scripts written by Brecht there are narrators and/or singers. These play similar roles. Often the songs in Brechtian theatre are not self indulgent and emotional. They all have a purpose and will often narrate the action going on onstage. I was in a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle and I was one of 9 singers. The songs were still beautiful but they had a purpose, in this case explaining Grusha’s journey – “When Grusha Vashnadze left the city/On the Grucinian highway/On the way to the Northern mountains/She sang a song, she bought some milk”.

Naming: Brecht’s characters were representations of parts of society and often their names echoed this. For example, the archetype of an old woman might be portrayed by a character named “Old Woman” – and this might be explained through a placard or sign. Even when characters did have names, such as Kattrin in Mother Courage and her Children, their journeys were put in place to make a point, explore an issue and to make the audience think. They were not put in as emotional plot devices so the audience can be passive and taken over by emotion. Brecht wished to cause change.

Detaching the audience: Brecht used lighting effects and sound effects to detach his audience from emotional content onstage. He did this so they would think subjectively about the issues being explored and would feel less engrossed in the action; aware that they were watching a play with purpose.  

Notes on Brecht from Mother Courage BBC Documentaries

-          Brecht has a split mind between the academic and more theatrical side of writing, directing and devising.

-          He believed in telling a story being the most important part of a piece of theatre; conveying a message. Often his pieces were a story within a story, a technique often used by other playwrights for example, Shakespeare (i.e. The Taming of the Shrew).

-          He wanted the audience to be fully aware they were watching a play. Playing on belief and disbelief.

-          One of Brecht’s most famous passions is for simplicity. Often in Brechtian theatre the stage is bear and fully visible, the stage crew in their normal clothes maybe even openly watching the action.

-          The ‘alienation’ effects that Brecht used are now a part of traditional theatre.

-          His work is more like un-theatre.

-          It is a message, not entertainment.

-          These are not techniques or systems – they are merely ideas.

-          He aimed for his plays to challenge thought and inspire change. Dialectical theatre.

-          Unlike much professional productions now, actors spent a long time still on their script before learning their lines.

-          A critical distance is left between the audience and the stage.

-          Much like Augusto Boal’s forum theatre, Brecht liked his work to be watched, judged and changed by the audience. They were actively involved.

-          Brecht believed in the “Art of being a spectator”.

-          He did not regard his scripts as being finished. The play was to be watched not read and the observed production was the finished product and only that. For example, the narrator parts in The Caucasian Chalk Circle are often turned in to song and are therefore not complete until the opening night.

-          Brecht was extremely open to changes with his script, characters and staging.

-          He began rather apathetic in his youth but grew to have a passion for inspiring change.

-          Hitler parody – large gestures showed how Brecht liked a story to ride on the action not the words, and with the purpose of making a comment.

-          DIALECTIC – the art or practice of arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical argument.

Brechtian Advice to Actors

Rational, calm detachment,

“The Brechtian style of acting is acting in quotation marks”

The actor should not impersonate, but narrate actions of another person, as if quoting facial gesture and movement.

As the audience is not allowed to identify with any character, the actors is not to identify with them either.

Brecht agrees with Stanislavsky that, if the actor believes he is the character, the audience will also believe it, and share his emotions. But, unlike Stanislavsky, he does not wish this to happen.

Rather than live or ‘be’ the character, an actor must show and portray them – become a representation of that person.

In rehearsals, Brecht advised actors to speak in the third person, the past tense and even say their stage directions in order to help this.

The play is cemented as not being real and the focus moves back to the message.

Who was Brecht and what were his main practices?

Brecht is one of the primary political theatre practitioners, among others including William Shakespeare, who wrote many political plays, and Augusto Boal, the developer of forum theatre and the Theatre of the Oppressed.

Brecht, a German poet, theatre director and playwright was born in 1898; as Stanislavsky’s life was coming to a close, Brecht’s was just beginning - their lives just overlapping and providing a translucent transition from one era to the next. When Brecht was at the age of 16, the First World War began, meaning that he found sanctuary in taking an additional medical course at Munich University. It was there that he met Arthur Kutscher, who inspired Brecht’s love for dramatist Frank Wedekind.

Bertolt Brecht

He did, however, eventually and up at war but only for a brief moment in time before he was sent back to Augsburg and the war ended a month later. The following year in July, Brecht and Paula Banholzer had a son.

The first play written by the playwright was called Baal and was written in 1918, followed by Drums in the Night in the February of 1919. Both of these plays along with In the Jungle helped Brecht attain the prestigious Kleist Prize for new writers. The judges claimed that his “language is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round."

Brecht had his second child, this time with his wife Marianne Zolf, called Hanne Hiob in 1923; she died only a few years ago in 2009 and was a successful German actress.

From his late twenties onwards, Brecht began to develop his idea of theatre not just as a form of entertainment, but as a means of sending a message and making a change.

One of his most important theories is the Verfremdungseffekt which can be translated as the ‘defamiliarisation effect’. This was the idea that the audience should be fully aware when they are watching a play that the events taking place on stage are not real and they are being portrayed by actors for a reason. He used techniques such as direct audience address, – “The artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall” (Brecht) - loud sound effects and placards to detach the audience from the characters and distance them from emotional attachment with them.  For example, Brecht didn’t want the audience to feel sorry for Mother Courage; he wanted them to analyse her situation and actions. In Fiona Shaw’s interpretation of the character the audience is left to question the morality of the character’s actions. Many elements that Brecht used to detach the audience are now major parts of traditional theatre, such as lighting and sound. Often in Brechtian theatre the stage crew do not wear blacks and are entirely visible, as is the theatre. The course of the story is more important than any final revelation.

These were all elements that began as a part of Brecht’s Epic Theatre. Brecht wanted audiences to watch thought and action provoking pieces of theatre that would inspire people to change things in the real world, rather than emotionally and complacently engrossing themselves in ‘pointless’ plays. It was reiterated over and over that what the audience sees on the stage of a Brechtian piece is merely a representation of the real thing, the real world, and that the audience are the real thing with the power to alter it. This aimed to inspire audience’s to make their own changes of their world, just as changes should be made in the world of the play.

He eventually married actress Helene Weigel and together they created the Berlinier Ensemble, a theatre company put together after the war.

Throughout his life, Brecht worked and collaborated with many other artistic bodies, and he died from a heart attack in 1956, at the age of 58. He is buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery on Chausseestraße in the Mitte neighbourhood of Berlin. His work still resonates today and has done in recent years through the work of various writers and practitioners including Caryl Churchill, Augusto Boal and David Hare.