Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
- Biography: Born in Augsburg, Germany, on 10 February 1898. Died in [East] Berlin on 14 August 1956.
- Received Stalin Peace Prize in 1955.
- Important works:
- 1. Three-penny-opera (1928),
- 2. Mahagonny (1930),
- 3. Mother Courage (1940),
- 4. The Good Woman of Setzuan (1943).
- 5. The Life of Galileo (1943)
- 6. Caucasian Chalk Circle (1954).
Dreigroschenoper (Three-Penny-Opera), 1928 |
3PO
|
Mahagonny (Berlin Komische Oper, 1984) |
LIONEL ABEL. METATHEATRE. NEW YORK: HILL AND WANG, 1963:
Bertolt Brecht’s protagonists are morally divided
beings (Puntilla, Courage, Azdak, Galileo). To appreciate them we
must divide our moral judgment. We have to condemn these characters
even as we approve them. They are too complex to be merely admired
or blamed. Brecht's plays have a grayness that is characteristically
his. In Baal, Brecht announces the object of his enduring
hatred, contempt, and disbelief: the individual, that is to say, moral
experience: "the individual...our age groans too heavily under the weight
of this child of the sixteenth century that the nineteenth fed to monstrous
size...We are anonymous forces. Individuality is an arabesque we
have discarded. All the ominous events we have been witnessing in
the last twelve years are nothing but a very awkward and longwinded way
of burying the concept of the European individual in the grave it has dug
for itself." Brecht was always against tragedy, which requires that
one take moral suffering seriously. He was also opposed to realism,
the theatrical form inherited from Ibsen in which the individual
plays so large a role. In A Man's a Man, Brecht expressed
his hatred for the individual analytically. In Three-penny-opera,
all moral values are swept away to a music that is overwhelming.
Communism was a way for Brecht of denying the individual and the value
of moral experience as such.
It is the human body which is the hero of
every important play Brecht wrote. The human body in its desire to
feed, sustain, and expend itself is the real hero of Mother Courage,
Puntilla,
The
Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Galileo. Brecht adored the
body. Brecht was interested neither in condemning his characters
nor in justifying them. His main characters are morally incoherent.
Brecht was not interested in them as individuals, but as striking images
of the human body in its assertiveness, natural ectasy, and desire to endure.
Puntilla (Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti)
is a negative character when he is sober. When drunk, Puntilla is
generous, natural, large minded, and amiable. This is because he
is under the influence of his body. A great moment of the play: Puntilla
dead drunk urinates ecstatically with his chauffeur against a wall: "I
couldn't live in the city. I need the open air, I have to piss freely
under the stars. If I can't have that, what have I? They say
that to do this outdoors is primitive. But I think it primitive to
piss on tile."
Brecht's characters are negative heroes (Bentley)
like Mother Courage. We are not to approve her morally. But
the affecting thing about her is not her moral consciousness but her vitality,
her physical endurance, her ability to go on from horror to horror, her
unbearable animality. All our confusions about her character arise
from the error of considering her as an individual, with a moral consciousness
of a sort we must condemn or approve. Courage is not a negative figure;
her positive attributes are those of the body, not of the soul.
Galileo. Perhaps his best play.
Brecht regarded his protagonist as a criminal for yielding to the pressure
of the Church. He also wanted audiences to condemn Galileo for his
cowardice. Brecht thought science had suffered from Galileo's recantation,
and hence, that Galileo was a criminal for not enduring martyrdom.
Galileo is Brecht's anti-Christ, the god who failed us. But Galileo
is charming. He is a genius and a rogue. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard
said that martyrdom is unjustifiable except in the name of something whose
victory is uncertain. It is not really martyrdom to die for the sake
of something you know will succeed. Hence, according to critic Lionel
Abel, there was no need for Galileo to have become a martyr since his ideas,
if true, would eventually be accepted. Galileo is a man interested
in eating, drinking, and thinking. Thought is reduced to a physical
activity ("he has thinking bouts."). The mind, according to Galielo,
ought to serve the body ("I don’t understand a man who doesn't use his
mind to fill his belly."). Galileo is a representative of the human
body, not of the mind or the spirit.
On the death of the individual:
A similar conviction about the individual is discoverable in the works
of Western writers before and during Brecht's time. That the individual
was dead or dying lies behind Eliot's suspicion of individual insight,
Joyce's cult of impersonality, the surrealist's dependence on automatic
writing, Lawrence's assertion that he was not interested in describing
individuals but only psychic and biological forces. Brecht never
believed the individual in society could be quite real or that moral experience
could be anything but an imposture. He is simply not a humanist.
What Brecht affirmed was the body, the human
body in its warmth, its weakness, its susceptibility, its appetites, its
longing and its thought. Brecht's best characters are mainly passive,
morally inconsequentional, inconsistent. The live by lies, fraud,
and, occasionally, by feats of thought.
|
The Good Woman of Setzuan UMBC Department of Theatre, 2001 |
|
Caucasian Chalk Circle UC-Davis, 1971 |
MARTIN ESSLIN. BERTOLT BRECHT: A CHOICE OF EVILS. LONDON: METHUEN, 1984:
Brecht’s plays showed the influence of the
Expressionist
trend in their loose construction, their treatment of the characters as
types rather than individuals, and their highly concentrated poetic language.
Brecht's theories show the influence of all these experiments. He
was convinced that the theater must become a tool of social engineering,
a laboratory of social change.
In 1797 Goethe and Schiller
had jointly presented their point of view in an essay, "On Epic and Dramatic
Poetry." It was against this specific theory that Brecht offered
his counter-theory. Goethe and Schiller said that the epic poet presents
the event as totally past, while the dramatic poet presents it as totally
present. The epic poet relates what has happened in calm contemplation.
The actor, of the other hand, is in exactly the opposite position: he represents
himself as a definite individual; he wants the spectators to participate
in his action, to feel the sufferings of his soul and of his body with
him, share his embarrassments and forget their own personalities for the
sake of his. The spectator must not be allowed to rise to thoughtful
contemplation; he must passionately follow the action; his imagination
is completely silenced.
It was this conception that Brecht abhorred,
and that he called, knowing that Goethe and Schiller had based their theory
on Aristotle's Poetics, the Aristotelian concept of drama, the drama
of catharsis by terror and pity, the drama of spectator identification
with the actors, the drama of illusion, which tries to create magical effects
by conjuring up events which are represented as totally present, while
palpably they are not. Such a theater therefore was a fraud.
Brecht, the rationalist demanded a theater of critical thoughtfulness,
an epic theater.
Brecht regarded a theater of illusion and
identification as downright obscene, and identification with the characters
on the stage appeared equally indecent to him. Such an audience,
Brecht argues, may indeed leave the theater purged by its vicarious emotions,
but it will have remained uninstructed and unimproved. The audience
in his view should not be made to feel emotions; it should be made to think.
But identification with the characters of the play makes thinking almost
impossible. The theater must not attempt at creating an illusion
of present reality (hence, Brecht goes instead to the remote past).
The epic theater is strictly historical; it constantly reminds the audience
that it is merely getting a report of past events. The audience must
be discouraged from losing its critical detachment by identification with
one or more of the characters: the opposite of identification is the maintenance
of a separate existence by being kept apart, alien, strange. Verfremdungseffekt
(the effect of making something strange, foreign, alienated, distant from
us and the present moment). The author can make characters introduce
themselves directly to the audience, or flash their names onto a screen.
He can tell the audience in advance how the play will end, thus freeing
their minds from the distraction of suspense. The epic theater alone
could present the complexity of the human condition in an age in which
the life of individuals could no longer be understood in isolation from
the powerful trend of social, economical, or historical forces affecting
the lives of millions.
At first Brecht declared that his theater
was strictly didactic. Later he made it a place of entertainment,
but not one of catharsis. Rather, the pleasure of theater consisted
in the discovery of a new truth.
In the epic theater there is no attempt to
create fixed, highly individualized dramatic characters. Character
emerges from the social function of the individual and changes with that
function. Character is always how a given person is going to act
in a specified set of circumstances and conditions. The story unfolds
in a number of separate situations, each rounded and complete in itself.
The juxtaposition and montage of contrasting episodes. The Aristotelian
drama can only be understood as a whole, while the epic drama can be cut
into slices which will continue to make sense and give pleasure.
Decor, music, and choreography maintain their independence. They
are autonomous elements which instead of pulling in the same direction
as the words, enter into a dialectical contrapuntal relationship with them.
The music does not merely express the mood of the words: it often stands
in contradiction to them, comments on them, or reveals the falsity of the
sentiments they express.
The epic theater does not use decor and music
to produce a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk with its diabolically
strong narcotic and hypnotic effect and concerted onslaught of the sense,
but to destroy the illusion of reality. The spectator of the dramatic
theater says "Life is like that." The spectator of the epic theater
says: "Life does not have to be like that. There are options."
The actor should not regard himself as impersonating
the character so much as narrating ("quoting") the actions of another person
at a definite time in the past. A theater which aims at preventing
the identification of the audience with the characters cannot allow the
identification of the actor with the character either. The epic actor
does not intend to put his audience into a trance, he must also keep himself
free from any state of trance. His muscles must remain relaxed.
The frantic outburst reflects the highest peak of acting of the dramatic
style of acting. The Brechtian actor is always loose limbed and relaxed,
always clearly in control of himself and his emotions. He must also
be able to suggest to the audience that the character's behavior is by
no means the only possible course of action, that there are always alternatives.
The actor is always conscious of the presence of the audience, unlike the
Stanislavsky
ideal of the actor who is completely alone and wrapped up in himself and
unaware of being observed.
The study of human nature is replaced by that
of human relations. Not the characters but the story in which they
are involved becomes the main concern of the epic, narrative, historical,
theatre. Everything depends on the story. Character acting
and reacting upon each other becomes the basic unit of the Brechtian theater.
Gestus: the whole range of the outward signs of social relationships,
including deportment, intonation, facial expression. Each scene of
a play has its basic Gestus (Grundgestus). The Gestus
(the correct stance, movement, and tone of voice) assumes greater importance
than the supposed inner life or emotions of these characters. By
analyzing the action the actors determine the basic story line (Fabel)
which is then broken down into smaller and smaller elements until each
scene appears as the expression of one simple, basic action, which can
be translated into a single sentence. This sentence or title ("Woyzeck
buys a cheap knife to kill his wife") contains the basic Gestus
of the scene which the producer and the actors will now have to put on
the stage. The producer is only concerned with bringing out its social
content and significance.
As Brecht tried to banish trance, illusion,
magical effects, and orgies of emotion from the theater, he tried to replace
them by lucidity, rationality, and elegance. The stage must be bathed
in light. Brecht insisted that the sources of light should remain
visible to the public. Nor was the curtain to be used to allow illusions
to be prepared in secret (hence his use of the half curtain). The
source of the music must also be visible, sometimes by placing the musicians
on the stage itself (this would be the contrary of Richard Wagner’s
innovation of “hiding” the orchestra below the stage). The songs
interrupt the action and give the audience an opportunity to reflect.
The coming of such an interruption is usually announced beforehand by some
visible change on the stage; the title of the song may flash on to a screen,
special lights may be put on, or a symbolic emblem (flags and trumpets)
may come down from the flies.
Richard Wagner's "hidden" orchestra |
Bertolt Brecht's "Gestus" |
To avoid identification with the character,
the actors translated their texts in the third person in the past tense.
Another device for inhibiting the identification of actor and character
is the inclusion of all stage directions in the text spoken during rehearsals.
In Brecht's Antigone (1948), the actors not involved in the action
sat in a semicircle at the back of the stage. Brecht adivised them
they should read, make small movements, put their make up, or leave the
stage quietly.
The Brechtian theater is a theater designed
to arouse indignation in the audience, dissatisfaction, a realization of
contradictions. It is a theater supremely fitted for parody, caricature,
and denunciation, therefore essentially a negative theater. That
is why Brecht's plays conspicuously lack positive heroes, why the good
characters are invariably crushed and defeated. If Brecht believed
that the epic theater was the truly Marxist theater, the authorities of
the Communist world certainly did not. They preferred the Stanislavsky
method of identification and illusion, which was the official acting method
of the Soviet Union.
Brecht's half-curtain |
Stanislavsky's method-acting |
JOHN WILLETT. BRECHT ON THEATER. LONDON: METHUEN, 1964:
8. "The Epic Theatre and its Difficulties"
(1927): "The essential point of the epic theatre is perhaps that
it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason. Instead
of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things."
13. "The Modern Theatre is the Epic
Theatre" (1930): "Our existing opera is a culinary opera."
"The irrationality of opera lies in the fact that rational elements are
employed, solid reality is aimed at, but at the same time it is all washed
out by the music. A dying man is real. If at the same time
he sings we are translated to the sphere of the irrational (if the audience
sang at the sight of him the case would be different)." "The pleasure
grows in proportion to the degree of unreality."
"The modern theater is the epic theatre.
[p. 37. LIST]
"When the epic theatre's methods begin to penetrate the opera the first
result is a radical separation of the elements. So long as the expression
Gesamtkunstwerk
('integrated work of art') means that the integration is a muddle, so long
as the arts are supposed to be 'fused' together, the various elements will
all be equally degraded, and each will act as a mere 'feed' to the rest.
The process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the
melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work
of art. Witchcraft of this sort must of course be fought against.
Whatever is intended to produce hypnosis is likely to induce sordid intoxication,
or create a fog: this must be given up. Words, music, and setting
must become more independent of one another. TEXT: We had to
make something straightforward and instructive of our fun. The form
employed was that of the moral tableau. The tableau is performed
by the characters in the play. The text had to be neither moralizing
nor sentimental, but to put morals and sentimentality on view. Equally
important was the spoken word and the written word (of the titles).
"In our present society the old opera cannot
be 'wished away.' Its illusions have an important social function.
The drug is irreplaceable; it cannot be done without." [The life
imposed on us is too hard; it brings us too many agonies, disappointments,
impossible tasks. In order to stand it we have to have some kind
of palliative. There seem to be three classes of these: overpowering
distractions, which allow us to find our sufferings unimportant, pseudo
satisfactions which reduce them, and drugs which make us insensitive to
them."]
A "Gesamntkunstwerk" production
(Troika Ranch 04)
Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal
(a perfect Gesamntkunstwerk)
20. "Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre
for Instruction" (1957): "The epic theatre was often objected to
as moralizing too much. Yet in the epic theatre moral arguments only
took second place. Its aim was less to moralize than to observe.
The object of our inquiry was not just to arouse moral objections to such
circumstances. We were not in fact speaking in the name of morality
but in that of the victims. Stylistically speaking, there is nothing
at all that new about the epic theatre. Its expository character
and its emphasis on virtuosity bring it close to the old Asiatic theater.
Didactic tendencies are to be found in the medieval mystery plays and the
classical Spanish theatre, and also in the theatre of the Jesuits.
23. "On the Use of Music in an Epic
Theatre" (1957): Music introduced variety but must be separated from
the other elements. 3po (1928): The small orchestra
was visible on the stage. Titles appeared before songs were sung.
The actors changed their positions before the songs would start.
The musical items had the immediacy of a ballad and were of a reflective
and moralizing nature ("Song concerning the Insufficiency of Human Endeavour").
The music was supposed to strip bare the middle class corpus of ideas.
The epic theater is chiefly concerned with
the attitudes which people adopt towards one another, wherever they are
socio-historically significant. The concern of the epic theatre is
thus eminently practical. Human behaviour is shown as alterable;
man himself as dependent on certain political and economic factors and
at the same time as capable of altering them. The spectator is given
the chance to criticize human behaviour from a social point of view, and
the scene is played as a piece of history.
38. "A Short Organum for the Theatre"
(1949): Theater consists in this: in making live representations
of reported or invented happenings between human beings and doing so with
a view to entertainment. It needs no other passport than fun.
Yet there are weaker (simple) and stronger (complex) pleasures. And
different periods' pleasures varied naturally according to the system under
which people lived in society at the time. The theater is still free
to find enjoyment in teaching and inquiring. Even the wholly anti-social
can be a source of enjoyment to society so long as it is presented forcefully
and on the grand scale. It then often proves to have considerable
powers of understanding and other unusually valuable capacities, applied
admittedly to a destructive end. Even the bursting flood of a vast
catastrophe can be appreciated in all its majesty by society, if society
knows how to master it; then we make it our own. For such an operation
as this we can hardly accept the theatre as we see it before us.
Let us go into one of these houses and observe the effect which it has
on the spectatores. Looking about us, we see somewhat motionless
figures in a peculiar condition: they seem strenuously to be tensing all
their muscles, except where these are flabby and exhausted. They
scarcely communicate with each other; their relations are those of a lot
of sleepers. True, their eyes are open, but they stare rather than
see, just as they listen rather than hear. They look at the stage
as if in a trance: an expression which comes from the Middle Ages, the
days of witches and priests.
The alienation effect: A representation
that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at
the same time makes it seem unfamiliar. The classical and medieval
theatre alienated its characters by making them wear human or animal masks;
the Asiatic theatre even today uses musical and pantomimic V effects.
Such barriers were certainly a barrier to empathy. The new alienations
are only designed to free socially conditioned phenomena from that stamp
of familiarity which protects them against our grasp today. It must
amaze its public, and this can be achieved by a technique of alienating
the familiar. This technique allows the theatre to make use in its
representations of the new social scientific method known as dialectical
materialism. In order to unearth society's laws of motion this method
treats social situations as processes, and traces out all their inconsistencies.
It regards nothing as existing except in so far as it changes, in other
words is in disharmony with itself. In order to produce V effects,
the actor has to discard whatever means he has learnt of getting the audience
to identify itself with the characters which he plays. Aiming not
to put his audience into a trance. His way of speaking has to be
free from parsonical sing-song and from all those cadences which lull the
spectator so that the sense gets lost. At no moment must he go so
far as to be wholly transformed into the character played. The verdict:
'he didn't act Lear, he was Lear' would be an annihilating blow to him.
His feelings must not at bottom be those of the character, so that the
audience's may not at bottom be those of the character either. The
actor must appear on the stage in a double role (e.g., as Charles Laughton
[the actor] and as Galileo [the character]). Also he need not pretend
that the events taking place on the stage have never been rehearsed, and
are now happening for the first and only time. It should be apparent
all through his performance that even at the start and in the middle he
knows how it ends and he must thus maintain a calm independence throughout.
The coherence of the character is in fact shown by the way in which its
individual qualities contradict one another.
The choice of viewpoint is a major element
of the actor's art, and it has to be decided outside the theatre.
Like the transformation of nature, that of society is a liberating act;
and it is the joys of liberation which the theater of a scientific age
has got to convey.
The actors should sometimes swap roles with
their partners during rehearsal and not dominate the others by making them
terrified and attentive (to him). If the part is played by somebody
of the opposite sex the sex of the character will be more clearly brought
out.
The actors ought not to drop into song but
should clearly mark it off from the rest of the text; and this is best
reinforced by a few theatrical methods such as changing the lighting or
inserting a title. The music must strongly resist the smooth incorporation
which is generally expected of it and turns it into an unthinking slavery.
Music does not accompany except in the form of comment. Music can
make its point in a number of ways and with full independence, and can
react in its own manner to the subjects dealt with; at the same time it
can also quite simply help to lend variety to the entertainment.
The stage designer gets considerable freedom
as soon as he no longer has to give the illusion of a room or a locality
when he is building his sets. It is enough for him to give hints
(i.e., use of reversible flags to show changes in political situation).
Elegant movement and graceful grouping can
alienate and inventive miming greatly helps the story.
So let us invite all the sister arts of the
drama, not in order to create an integrated work of art in which they all
offer themselves up and are lost, but so that together with the drama they
may further the common task in their different ways; and their relations
with one another consist in this: that they lead to mutual alienation.
Their task is to entertain the children of
the scientific age, and to do so with sensuousness and humor.
43. "Stage Design for the Epic Theatre"
(1951): Just to copy reality is not enough. Reality needs not
only to be recognized but also to be understood. It is more important
nowadays for the set to tell the spectator he's in a theatre than to tell
him he's in, say, Aulis. The best thing is to show the machinery,
the ropes and the flies. If the set represents a town it must look
like a town that has been built to last precisely two hours. Everything
must be provisional. The materials of the set must be visible.
52. "Can the Present day World be Reproduced
by Means of Theatre?" (1955): The present day world can only be described
to present-day people if it is described as capable of transformation.
In an age whose science is in a position to change nature to such an extent
as to make the world seem almost habitable, man can no longer describe
man as a victim, the object of a fixed but unknown environment.
53. "Appendices to the Short Organum"
(1960): True V effects are of a combative nature. Every art
contributes to the greatest art of all, the art of living. The bourgeois
theatre's performances always aim at smoothing over contradictions, at
creating false harmony, at idealization. Conditions are reported
as if they could not be otherwise; characters as individuals, incapable
by definition of being divided, cast in one block, manifesting themselves
in the most various situations, likewise for that matter existing without
any situation at all. If there is any development it is always steady,
never by jerks, the developments always take place within a definite framework
which cannot be broken through. None of this is like reality, so
a realistic theater must give it up. For a genuine story to emerge
it is most important that the scenes should to start with be played quite
simply one after another, using the experience of real life, without taking
account of what follows or even of the play's overall sense. The
story then unreels in a contradictory manner; the individual scenes retain
their meaning; they yield and stimulate a wealth of ideas; and their sum,
the story, unfolds authentically without any cheap all pervading idealization
(one word leading to another) or directing of subordinate, purely functional
component parts to an ending in which everything is resolved.
A quotation from Lenin: "It is impossible
to recognize the various happenings in the world in their independence
of movement, their spontaneity of development, their vitality of being,
without recognizing them as a unity of opposites."
What about the art of primitive peoples, madmen,
and children? "We suspect that unduly subjective representations
of the world have antisocial effects."
RE: FAUST'S TRAGEDY: "Whoever
wishes to rise higher on earth must inevitably create pain, [that] the
need to pay for development and satisfaction is the unavoidable tragedy
of life i.e., the cruellest and most commonplace principle: that
you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs." [p. 280].
|
Mother Courage |
Designed
on 29 October 2003
by
A. Robert Lauer
arlauer@ou.edu
Revised on
2 November 2005
Return
to SPAN 4184