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.
The term "Epic Theatre" is now widely use to describe the style and techniques popularized in
Germany after World War I by directors like Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator, and (most especially)
Bertolt Brecht. This style flourished in the left-wing theatres and cabarets of Berlin during the ill-
fated German "Weimar Republic" of the 1920's and early 30's; although the rise of Hitler's Nazi
Regime choked off its development after 1933, when Brecht and other epic theatre practitioners were
forced to flee persecution and arrest by the Gestapo, the style spread to the U.S. and Great Britain,
and returned to Central and Eastern European theatre after the end of World War II.
Influenced by the horror of World War I's human cost, by the suffering of the middle and lower
classes during the postwar recessions of the 1920's and the Great Depression of the 1930's and by the
teaching of Marxism, Brecht and his fellow epic theatre artists devised a set of staging and acting
techniques meant to teach their audience to criticize the injustices and inequalities of modern life.
Two keys to their technique are the notion of "theatricalism" and the concept of the "distancing" or
"alienation" effect.
The first, theatricalism, simply means the audience aware that they are in a theatre watching a play.
Brecht believed that "seducing" the audience into believing they were watching "real life" led to an
uncritical acceptance of society's values. He thought that by keeping stage sets simple, showing
exposed lighting instruments, breaking the action into open-ended episodes, projecting labels or
photographs during scenes, or using a narrator or actors to directly address the audience, a
production would allow an audience to maintain the emotional objectivity necessary to learn the truth
about their society.
The second key to epic theatre, the "distancing" or "alienation" effect in acting style, has these same
goals. Brecht wanted actors to strike a balance between "being" their character onstage and "showing
the audience that the character is being performed." The use of "quotable gesture," (the employment
of a stance, mannerism, or repeated action to sum up a character), the sudden shift from one behavior
to another to put the audience off-balance, and the suggestion of the "roads not taken" in each
moment of a character's decision-making are all the means to the didactic end of teaching us to
criticize the society we see onstage in Epic Theatre.
Introduction
Bertolt Brecht is one of the most influential figures in Twentieth century theatre changing forever
the way we do theatre.
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. (Overhead 2 & 3) He died on 14 August at home in East Berlin. The BE
continues to exist.
Brecht the man, his theatre, his plays and his legacy remains the subject of much heated debate more
than 50 years after his death, for reasons that I hope to make clear over the next 12 weeks.
Throughout the course which will cover his acting theories, a selection of his plays and the
arguments about Brecht will run the question of Brecht today. Must Brecht be relevant today in order
to read and perform his theatre? How useful is his style of theatre? How radical and so on.
In the Prologue to Fredric Jamesons Brecht and method (1998) he writes,
Brecht would have been delighted, I like to think, at an argument, not for his
greatness. . . as rather for his usefulness . . . right now . . .

Im not so sure brecht has to be useful. I rather think we are distant enough from Brecht as to be able
to see him in his own context and thereby understand something about theatres recent history that
has affected the way we do theatre today.
I suggest that one of the key aspects of brecht for us today is that his theatre gives us an insight into a
period in which there was a passionate commitment to theatre as an agent of social change. This was
a time, the first half of the twentieth century, the pre-television era, when theatre played a much more
vital social role than it does today. In a sense we can study Brecht like we do classical Greek theatre
and Shakespeare as one of theatres high points, at one of its most intensive periods of change.
Popular conceptions of brecht
Brecht is best known for the creation of a new kind of theatre which he called Epic Theatre and for
the plays that continue to be studied and performed today. He is famous for reading and absorbing
Karl marxs Das Kapital for being a communist who never actually joined the party, for developing
a political theatre that was designed to change society by changing the way people thought. He is
famous for going into exile when the nazis came to power and spending the war in America. He is
famous for his glasses and his cigar. He is famous for writing songs with Kurt Weill, and poetry.
More recently he has been denounced as a sexist pig who used hios female collaborators but failed to
give them due credit for their labour. He is famous for his multiple affairs, his marriage to Helene
Weigel, his broken promises to heartbroken lovers and his early death.

In the early days of his career in the theatre Brecht was motivated by a desire to modernise German
theatre - to free it from virtually everything that came before him. This was the stolid classicism of
Schiller and Goethe, Romanticism, Naturalism and Expressionism. He experimented with the formal
aspects of theatre, drawing on avant garde techniques of collage, montage, titles, the documentary
and photo-journalism. He set about creating a theatre for the modern age which would represent the
modern age and its subjects in a much more vital and realistic way than the stupefying dramas of
byegone eras.
Brecht called his modern theatre the EpicTheatre 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 Brechts
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, Brechts 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.
Approaches to Brecht
A number of ways of approaching Brecht. He was a dramatist, a director, a dramaturg, a poet and a
theorist as well as an engaged and committed intellectual who had a wide circle of artistic and
intellectual friends :
There is Brecht the dramatist, who wrote plays:
Beginning in 1922 with Baal and Drums in the Night at the age of 24. Followed by Man is Man in
1926, Mahogonny , a musical collaboration with Kurt Weill in 1927 and his first great success The
Threepenny Opera in 1928. His most famous plays were written in exile: Mother Courage, 1941 in
Scandanavia, The Good Person of Szechwan and Galileo in 1943, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1948
Video Mahogonny: Moon of Alabama
Brecht the practitioner, who directed his own and others plays for the Munich playhouse and later
the Berliner Ensemble.
He directed his first play at the age of 26 at the Munich Kammerspiele.
Brecht was a critic of the German classical theatre from the time of his university days in Munich.
On leaving university he became a dramaturg at the small theatre known as the Kammerspiele and
two years later, he directed Marlowe's Edward 11 with Casper Naher as the designer.
O/H 4 He wrote,
 we wished to make possible a production which would break with the Shakespearean
tradition common to German theatres: that lumpy monumental style . . .
O/H. The Berliner Ensemble was established in 1949 at the Deutsches Theater with a production
of Herr Puntila und sein Knecht. They moved to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm as an independent
state theatre in 1954 and took Mother Courage to the International Theatre festival in Paris in the
same year, followed by The Caucasian Chalk Circle in 1955.
German dramatist Marieluise Fleisser said of his style,
He did not analyse the characters; he set them at a distance . . He called for a report on
the events. He insisted on simple gestures. He compelled a clear and cool manner of
speaking . No emotional tricks were allowed. That ensured the objective epic style.

Brecht the dramaturg, and theorist who documented his theatre practice, analysed it and presented it
variously as a model of the performance building process, eg. the `Modelbucher', and as a description
of acting, a statement about the social and political purpose of theatre and dramaturgical observations
of the new style of acting - A Short Organum for the Theatre (1948)
As a theorist, he is most associated with the creation of a new mode of theatre known as Epic Theatre
and the acting techniques of Verfremdungseffekt and Gestus. Epic theatre introduced the parable
form to modern theatre, the construction of a tale set in a different time and place that refers to the
contemporary situation. The parable is a simple tale that communicates a moral point , as in the
Bublical parables, or political point, as in Brecht. Music and titles and the fragmentation of the story
or fable into episodes.

o/h 1 List of writings on Theatre and short descriptions

Brecht the myth. Brecht's poetry, the leather coat, the cigar, the short cropped hair..looking like a
cross between Groucho Marx and a petty criminal. In a poem Of Poor B.B he writes:
I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests.
My mother moved me into cities as I lay
Inside her body. And the coldness of the forests
Will be inside me till my dying day.....
o/h 2 `Of Poor B.B.' (Read verses 1, 2,3 and 9)
Brecht the subject of feminist critique - female characters and attitude to women.
Brecht the liar - subject of a book by John Fuegi, The Life and Lies of
Bertolt Brecht (HarperCollins, 1994) in which he argues that the works for which he was most most
famous were written by others, namely a group of devoted women who were also his lovers -
Elizabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau. For example it was Elizabeth Hauptmann
who adapted John Gay's Beggars Opera into The Threepenny Opera, it is said she was responsible
for 80 to 90% of the published text and for which she received only 12.5% of the income (Weill 25%
and Brecht 62.5%). Margarete Steffin co-wrote Galileo, The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother
Courage. (source: Michael Hulse, `A parasite and the women who made him great' review in The
European 12-18 August, 1994
SOURCES
Brecht began writing Mother Courage after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, the act that precipitated
the second world war. He completed the first draft in exile in Sweden.
The immediate inspiration for the story according to Thompsons account was Johan
Runebergs Tales of a Subaltern. In one of the tales, a woman called Lotte Svard survives
precariously by supplying essential provisions to war-worn soldiers during Swedens Thirty Year
War. This war involving Sweden, Germany and Poland seemed to provide a precedent for brechts
own situation in which these three countries were linked. As a german exile in Sweden and germany
invades poland these three players were again united in war.
The Thirty Years War
The Thirty Years War began in 1618 as a dispute over the kingship of Bohemia and lasted thirty
years with falling and rising intensity. It finally petered out in 1648. Central to the dispute was a
conflict between catholics and protestants. The war was in practice a series small wars and it
appears that victory usually went to the general whose armies were bet provisioned. The heroes
were Gustavus Adolphus on the Protestant side and Wallenstein for the Catholics.
According to Thompsons account, cooks were popular, chaplains were liable to persecution by the
other side and captured soldiers would join the armies of the better fed enemy.
The historical Thirty years war provided Brecht with a distancing device from where he could launch
a critique of nazi militarism and territorialisation of surrounding countries: Poland, Denmark, Russia
, France and of war. The Thirty Years War removed in time if not space from the Nazi invasion of
Poland and the impending outbreak and acceleration of war in Europe but it was close enough to
indicate its referant.
As a critique of war, Mother Courage as the plays central character is drawn from literary, visual
and folk accounts of the misguided women who tried to profit from war. To the case of Lotte Svard
mentioned aboce can be added a female adventuress called Courage who features in Hans Jacob
Christoffel von Grimmelshausens Simlicissimus, novel whose narrator is embroiled in the Thirty
years war. The account of the war included graphic descriptions of atrocities and the blandness with
which they were executed and accepted.

Her story: Thomson. P. 5-6

Another german classic informs Mother Courage: Friedrich Schillers Wallenstein trilogy. In this tale
a canteen-woman in the Thirty Years War named Gussie from Blasewitz follows the war.
Sarah Bryant bertail tells us of Breughals Mad Meg as another source for the play.

Politcal Context
The atttitude to war in Mother Courage is communicated in the discourse of the mise en scene:
Mother Courages Wagon, a sign of the dislocation of war, the movement of civilians away from the
war zone, their possessions in tractors and wheelbarrows, images most recetly revivied thpugu tv
picture of the Bosnian war and again in kosovo in 2000.
Yet brechts take on war inversts the movement of civilian families away from the war zone towzrds
safe havens. Mother Courage and her Children follow rather than flee the war in a gest which tells us
about their economic situation as traders and their politics, a pragmatic one that puts survival at all
costs before any national or religious allegiance.
MCs cynical attitude to war it doesnt matter who wins or loses the little people will always
suffer exposes the situation where in war the bourgoeisie the ship-building, aircraft-building,
armaments and steel factory owners profited from war while the poor suffer no matter what aside
they are on.

The Play in Performance

Scene 1: At the plays opening: a bare stage. Two Soldiers. Mother Courage makes her entrance on
the revolving stage sitting on her wagon drawn bu her two sons, their horse having died. The
entrance is announced by music,
Scene 2: Mother Courage is in the Swedish camp. The Model Book indicates that a split stage is used
for this scene. The actors in one part of the stage ( the General and Eiliff) are unaware that Mother
Courage and the Cook on the other side of the stage overhear them. There is also speculation here
that the generals advances towards Eilif are sexually motivated.

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes
War as Business
Brecht states in the Courage Model Book that the play conceives of war as a "continuation of
business by other means." War is neither some supernatural force nor simply a rupture in civilization
but one of civilization's preconditions and logical consequences. In this respect, there are many
dialoguesthe most explicit one appearing in Scene 3that cast war as another profit venture by
Europe's great leaders. Mother Courage is the play's primary small businesswoman, parasitically
living off of the war with her canteen wagon. As the Model Book observes the "big profits are not
made by little people." Courage's commitment to the business of war will cost her children, the war
taking back for what it has provided her in flesh.

Virtue in Wartime
The Model Book also remarks that war "makes the human virtues fatal even to their possessors."
This "lesson" appears from the outset of the play, prefiguring the fate of Mother Courage and her
children. Telling each of her children's fortunes, Courage will conjure their deaths at the hand of their
respective virtues: bravery, honesty, and kindness. Later, The Cook will rehearse this lesson in "The
Song of the Great Souls of the Earth." As we will see, Brecht often attributes these virtues ironically.
Courage, for example, is often a coward, and Eilif is more a murderer than a brave hero.

Verfremdungseffekt

The Verfremdungseffekt, alienation or "distanciation" effect, is the primary innovation of Brecht's

epic theater. By alienating the spectator from the spectacle, its devices would reveal the social gestus
underlying every incident on-stage and open a space for critical reflection. Often alienation also
means making the workings of the spectacle possible, and decomposing the unity of the theatrical
illusion. Brecht called for the spectator's alienation to oppose the mystifying tendencies of the
conventional stage, tendencies that reduced its audience to passive, trance-like states. The possible
techniques of alienation are endless. Slight chances in pace, alternative arrangements of the players
on-stage, experiments in lighting, gesture, and tone. The success of each scene in Mother Courage
hinges upon these devices. For example, Courage's "Song of the Great Capitulation," when played
without alienation, risks seducing the spectator with the pleasures of surrender rather than exposing
the depravity in the submission to an unjust authority.

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 Courageexplicitly located in her particular socio-historical context as
well as the context of the performanceis 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.

Music

At times the reader of Brecht feels trapped in a Marxist Gilbert and Sullivan musical. Rather than
accompany or integrate itself into the theatrical illusion, music largely assumes an independent
reality in Mother Courage, standing apart from the action. Brecht often underscored this separation
by lowering a musical emblem whenever such a song would arise. Music is neither a simple
accompaniment nor exclusively the expression of a character's current state, at times functioning
instead in its autonomy as allegory, or as covert political commentary. Often it assumes a
pedagogical function. Note, for example, how Courage teaches the soldier surrender through her
song of capitulation or Yvette attempts to harden Kattrin to love through her "Fraternization Song."

Business practices
Deemed a "damned soul" in the Model Book, Mother Courage works tirelessly, resting only once in
the course of the play. Her haggling, careful inventory, and so on frame and punctuate the action,
emphasizing its underlying the social gestus. Courage always protects her interests shrewdly,
inquiring into the fate of the war with only her profit in mind. Her practices emerge from the social
conditions that determine the characters, committing her to the war. Ultimately she will lose each of
her children as a result. Moreover, as the final scene chillingly shows, so ritualized are these
practices that Courage will not learn from her losses.

Capitulation
Written in the midst of the growing Nazi terror, Mother Courage would impel its spectators to
oppose war. In this respect it features a number of moments of capitulation as object lessons: most
notably, the withdrawal of Courage and the Young Soldier from the captain's tent in Scene Four and
the submission of the peasants in Scene 11. Mother Courage emphasizes the ritual character of
capitulation. Years of war have frozen the people into fixed patterns of surrender and lamentation.
Standing against these surrenders is Kattrin, disfigured and silenced by war trauma to which she
continually bears witness, who risks both livelihood and life to save a town under surprise attack.

Maternity

Against Mother Couragea mother who fails to protect her childrenthe play places Kattrin. Her
kindness involves an impulse to mother in opposition to her mother's coldhearted business sense. As
the Model Book notes, if Courage's war spoils consist of the loot she can scavenge, Kattrin's are the
children she saves. Notably, her heroic interventionone that breaks her stony silenceis the
salvation of the children of Halle.

Symbols

Yvette's red boots are one of the play's most ready symbols. An archetypal fetish object, they
represent femininity and feminine eroticism. Thus, it makes sense that they belong to the play's
whore. Kattrin dons these boots playfully in Scene Three, imitating Yvette's walk in a private
daydream. The Model Book argues that she does so because prostitution is the only way love
remains available to her in wartime. In doing so, it perhaps overstates the case and, strangely enough,
assumes Kattrin's total identification with her friend. Kattrin's masquerade as the whore does not
necessarily mean she aims to become one.