Bertolt Brecht’s theories and dramatic conventions of Epic Theatre have influenced contemporary playwrights’ and audiences’ attitudes towards plays for decades. Thus below are a list of Brecht’s most influential theories ranging from approaches to acting, to audiences’ involvement with plays.
In Brecht’s essay The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre, he stated that his theatre work is based on a “radical separation of the elements of production.”
Theories
- The Alienation Effect - technique which distances the audience from an emotional connection with the play through abrasive reminders of the artificiality of the theatrical performance. Brecht first used the term in an essay on “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” published in 1936, in which he described it as “playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play.”
- Complex Seeing - first found in Brecht’s notes to the Threepenny Opera. “Some exercise in complex seeing is needed - though it is perhaps more important to be able to think above the stream than to think in the stream.” Here Brecht describes a desired form of spectator involvement, in which the ‘stream’ of the play’s action does not fully capture the audience’s attention leading to a form of critical evaluation from the spectator’s side.
- Demonstration - an approach to acting which implies a definite distance built into the actor’s manner of playing a character. It is the complete opposite of the Stanislavski-influenced “method acting” approach.
- Gestus - an acting technique that is the combination of a gesture and a social meaning in a singular movement, stance or vocal display. It is used to convey the thematic ideas significant to the play or the particular scene, as well as denoting a character’s social attitude and relationships with others.
- Fabel - refers to an analysis of the plot of a play. It can be split into three aspects.
- An analysis of the events portrayed in the story. (e.g. In epic theatre the analysis would focus on the social interactions between the characters and the causality of their behaviour from a Marxist historical materialist perspective.) Elizabeth Wright wrote in her book Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (1989) that a fable summarises “the moral of the story not in a merely ethical sense, but also in a socio-political one.”
- Analyses the plot, the play’s dramatic structure and its shaping of events portrayed from a formal and semiotic perspective.
- Analyses the attitudes that the play appears to embody and articulate. Brecht refers to this aspect of the play as its ‘Gestus’.
- Interruptions - a theatrical technique in which an action, a gesture, a song, etc, is halted in some way. Brecht likened this to a ‘pair of scissors’ cutting a drama into pieces.
- Not/But - an acting technique that involves the actor preceding each thought that is expressed by their character with its dialectical opposite.This technique underlines the aspect of ‘decision’ in the thought or action, and is a rehearsal exercise, not for the final performance. One of Brecht’s examples of this technique is “He didn’t say ‘come in’ but ‘keep moving’.”
- Separation of the Elements - an aesthetic principle which is the absolute opposite to that of the “integrated work of art” proposed by Wagner which is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so.
- The Street Scene - a basic model for epic theatre It makes use of a simple incident, something that could be seen on a street corner, where an individual conveys what has just happened to an audience. Brecht summarised this model in his book Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (1964) by using the example of an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place. “The bystanders may not have observed what happened, or they may simply not agree with him, may ‘see things a different way’; the point is that the demonstrator acts the behaviour of driver or victim both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the incident.”