In the 1920’s Brecht married Helene Weigel who remained his wife for the rest of his life. He also wrote these three plays: Drums in the Night, In The Jungle of the Cities and Baal. Each of these plays was directed by leading directors at the time and they attracted al lot of scandal because of the provoking content and new style. He also undertook his first collaboration with the composer Kurt Weill in Mahogonny and then The Threepenny Opera, which was immensely popular and firmly established him as a leading playwright and theatre practitioner. He started to develop his didactic plays at this point, including the The Yes Sayer and later due to criticism of its negative ending where a young boy is killed he wrote The No Sayer. Whilst in Berlin he saw a film by his friend Sergei Eisenstein, which introduced him to the technique of montage that he later used.
Brecht’s life can be divided into three stages:
∙ Munich and Berlin, 1919 - 1933
∙ The years in exile, 1933 - 1948
∙ The Berliner Ensemble, 1949 – death.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Brecht left everything behind him and fled. He lived in Denmark with his wife and two children, he visited Russia and was inspired by the Chinese style of acting he saw while he was there, which taught him more about Verfremdungseffekt. Eventually he was forced to move to Stockholm, Finland, and then to America. When he returned to Berlin in 1949 he set up the Berliner Ensemble, where many of his previously unperformed plays were performed. Brecht’s theories and practice changed dramatically through these periods of change and by the end of his life he had rewritten most of his theoretical work.
Brecht wanted to change the world through his theatre and he developed his theory of Epic theatre to achieve this. He hated the prevailing theatre style of the time, which was dramatic theatre. It was a style that promoted the illusion of the theatre, it sought to suck the audience into a dream world, where they did not have to think and they could leave their real lives behind them. It created a plot involving conflicts and problems that were all resolved on stage by the end of the play and which the audience could forget about when they left. Brecht’s Epic theatre challenged the illusion of the theatre. He wanted his audience to be awake and alert, and he invited them to question what was happening on stage. He left the conflicts and problems totally unresolved at the end of the play so that the audience member had something to resolve in his life in the real world.
Since early on in his life Brecht was fascinated by the entertainment at travelling fairs, which did not rely on the technology of modern theatre with all its illusory power. It was therefore very appealing to Brecht because he wanted to destroy the illusion of the theatre. The techniques used by fair-ground entertainers were also used later by Brecht in his plays. They involved a narrator, stories with a moral message often illustrated by pictures because the audience was largely illiterate, musical interludes, daylight performances and the audience free to come and go as they please.
Brecht was greatly influenced by his friend Sergei Eisenstein who was a film maker and used the technique of montage, which involved cutting apparently unrelated images together to bring the spectator to a point of realisation. Brecht was interested in shocking the audience to keep them awake and alert he did this by using a form of montage in the theatre. Brecht created short self contained and apparently unrelated scenes and put them right next to each other this drew out aspects of those scenes that Brecht wanted people to see and made them recognise and understand issues that he was trying to communicate. With montage the emphasis was on the visual and so Brecht made sure that the scene was perfectly choreographed so that every movement was in place and it was clear what was happening without speaking. It was a new way of structuring a play and it totally broke down the realistic growth and development of the plot that happened in dramatic theatre and it thereby focused the audience on the content of the play, which is what Brecht intended.
To get the desired response from the audience Brecht was interested in distancing them from the action so that they were not sucked into the dream world. This is not to say that he did not want them to be involved rather he wanted them to take an objective viewpoint. He sought to defamiliarize the things that the audience were familiar with and thereby make them look more carefully at what was there and see more clearly the world around them. In this way he thought they would be in a better position to act upon what they had seen. He coined the term Verfremdungseffekt after a trip to Moscow, to describe this distancing effect, but he had already developed the technique of distancing the audience before going to Moscow. He saw in Moscow something that confirmed a theory that he had been practicing in plays before then.
Brecht also worked directly with actors, and his theories of how they should act and portray a character contributed greatly to his theory of Epic theatre. He developed the theory of gestic acting, which involved the actor having an attitude towards performance that was totally different to the actor’s attitude towards performance in dramatic theatre. The actor was to stand outside the character, not empathising with the inner condition of the character. The actor would not portray the psychological aspects of the character in a realistic way but in a way that displayed the character objectively. Brecht was inspired by Charlie Chaplin, who through silent film could portray meaning clearly and precisely because of his attention to detail and his larger than life gestures. In the same way Brecht wanted his actors to make the their actions ‘shown’ and make all feeling external. This was a totally different style to Stanislavski’s methods, which involved the actor recreating the emotions of the character in himself. In collaboration with the composer Kurt Weill, Brecht saw the music as gestural aswell as the acting and just as important. He felt that the music could comment on the action, reinforcing the meaning and supporting the characters.
Music was a vital part of the theatre for Brecht and all of his major productions had an extensive musical score. His interest in music in the theatre began with his interest in the entertainment at travelling fairs as a boy. He played the guitar and sang political songs himself and music in the theatre became a medium through which to present his philosophies. He also saw music as a way of keeping the audience awake and alert and at the same time highlighting the important points in the action. Music in his productions also acted as entertainment, as a counterpoint to the text. It interrupted the text and so it was introduced by a change of the stage set up or the lighting. The music was always treated as a separate element and equally as important as the other elements in the theatre. Becht used popular music forms, not like the operatic style where the audience was swept in to the illusory dream world by the music. The orchestra was usually made obvious to the audience thereby breaking the illusion of the theatre and distancing the audience.
Brecht often collaborated with the set designer Casper Neher and he placed great importance on his work. He felt that the set designer was a stage builder and this contrasted with the prevailing dramatic view of the time, which saw the stage designer as a stage picture-maker. Brecht appreciated the skill of Neher and they worked very closely together, the set came about from the collaboration of the playwright, the actor and the designer. Brecht’s plays were always political and based on an argument, which required a certain attitude in all the elements of the production. Brecht valued Neher because he could create an attitude in the set design that complimented the argument that Brecht was displaying. Brecht also used the set to keep the audience awake and alert and prevent them from being sucked into the illusory world of the theatre. He did this by displaying what was behind the stage and he reminded the audience of the fact that they were in a theatre. His most famous method of doing this was by using a half curtain, which did not cover the whole stage and the audience could see what was going on behind.
A major development quite early on in Brecht’s career was when he wrote the plays that have been labelled, ‘The Lehrstuck’ or ‘Learning Plays’. The theory behind writing them was to challenge the dramatic form of theatre and to involve the audience in arguments about communism. His Epic theatre style was totally contrary to the dramatic style and with the help of his collaborators he began to raise questions that challenged the dramatic style of theatre that he was so against. In the writings of Karl Marx he found a philosophy that mirrored his and he began to write more vigorously to inspire political change. His belief was that the oppressed poor people had to be inspired to fight for political change and thereby relieve their suffering. These plays were written for a music festival and they took place on a very open stage, which allowed more audience involvement. Behind the stage there was a projection screen which displayed the text and invited the audience to join in by singing along. Sometimes there would be actors in the audience to lead the audience response. In this way Brecht hoped to involve the audience in the political debates within the text.
Throughout his life Brecht collaborated with other writers, musicians, directors and designers. His work was always an amalgamation of efforts and yet he managed to claim it as his own. By the end of his life he was a leading figure in theatre his productions had changed the way people viewed theatre because of their innovative ideas and detailed acting and design. Through exploring Brecht’s work I have learnt more about the theatre, its origins and its potential.