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.
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| 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.
