Tag: Caucasian Chalk Circle

Interview with Tom Kuhn: Part 7

Tom Kuhn is Professor of Twentieth-Century German Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College. His main research interests are in political literature in the 20th century. He has worked particularly on Bertolt Brecht, and is the series editor of the main English-language edition of Brecht’s works.

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

• Set text for GCSE and A level
• Theatrical style
• The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
• Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing

PC: Brecht’s theatre is often mediated: the stories are told by somebody for a purpose. Is that most clear in The Caucasian Chalk Circle?

TK: Yes. It is strikingly clear there because you’ve got the singer, who is on the stage, mediating the story: mediating between the outer story and the inner story of the play. Also between that and the audience, which he does explicitly when he says things like, “Here is what she thought but could not say” and he speaks her thoughts. And we’re told explicitly that he is holding a book of the story in front of him much like John the Baptist in the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald that we discussed earlier. Like John the Baptist, the singer comes from a different time frame, he’s on the stage throughout, he has a book with him, it’s described as a small book, not a big book. But in other ways it is so remarkably similar that you can’t help thinking that Brecht still had this image in mind when he was writing The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

PC: You have spoken about every one of Brecht’s plays being a new experiment, what was the experiment with The Caucasian Chalk Circle?

TK: Well, I think The Caucasian Chalk Circle is interesting in lots of ways, but partly he started off trying to write a play that would be a star vehicle for a Hollywood actress who he had met that might actually get him success in the States. That had been something that had escaped him so far. He always wanted to be a success (that is absolutely clear), he was vain about his own ability. Okay with some justification. But he was frustrated that he couldn’t get through to a bigger audience in the States. So that was maybe where it started off. But then it soon drifts away from that and the actress never took any interest in the play. So it becomes an experiment in thinking about the world after the war. It’s almost the only one of Brecht’s plays that almost ends optimistically. You have to have those ‘almosts’ in there because they’re in the play as well. I mean the singer says we’ll look back on this as ‘the golden age nearly of justice’ or ‘which was almost just’. So that ‘nearly’ sense is very important in the play. It is also an experiment in looking at how a world can pick itself up, or what prospect there is for the future after cataclysmic historical change. That’s what happens in the play, you know, there is a revolution, a war, all of these things going on in the background, and in the end we have a society that is brought back together again; the old order has been deposed. But the new order looks like it is going to be just as bad as the old order was, possibly. What are the hopes for the future? Of course the hope for the future is the child, the symbolically adopted child of the peasant and the returning soldier, and that is the hope for the future.

PC: Does the child represent the connection between the two worlds: the wealthy and the poor?

TK: Yes. The child is a child of aristocracy but has become a child of the people. So that is part of the experiment of the play. I think it is also a quite serious attempt to get back to the basics of Epic Theatre, which is why I think it has the singer and the framework and so many things that we think of as features of the Epic. Because The Life of Galileo had been a little bit, well Brecht himself describes it as retrograde in technical terms: ‘technically a great step backwards’. The Caucasian Chalk Circle is more of an open attempt to engage with the idea of Epic Theatre, and to engage with an audience in that way.

PC: The way you describe it as ‘almost optimistic’. That word ‘almost’ is a good way to sum up his work. His plays challenge the audience with an ‘almost’ and tease you into engaging with them.

TK: You always have to see with Brecht what the alternatives might have been and how it might have all gone wrong (or right, or in any case differently). There is none of the inevitability of the traditional theatre. The traditional ending to comedy is a wedding and The Caucasian Chalk Circle has a happy union of the lovers. But it is not an unambiguously celebratory moment. There is a dance at the end, but it’s a dance that isn’t just a glorious dance of “now the rest of life will be wonderful”. There is a much more threatening undercurrent in the background: the sense that this is also a historical moment which may pass and difficult times may come again.

Brecht talked about this in his acting theory as well. You’re meant to see that characters make choices and it could have gone the other way. That triggers in the audience a reflection on their own choices and what would happen if … I think that is very much the spirit of the ending of The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

PC: It is interesting that Brecht chooses to put the ‘what would happen if …’ on the audience. In the theatrical context he reacts against that question is the actor’s: the magic if of Stanislavski. The “what if…” is swallowed up and digested by the actor and then presented to the audience. Brecht makes an interesting and striking shift away from his theatrical context: refocusing what theatre is.

Summary

• The singer in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle is strikingly similar to the mediating role played by John the Baptist in the Isenheim Altarpiece.
• The Caucasian Chalk Circle is an experiment in thinking about the world after the war.
• It is also an experiment looking at what prospect there is for the future after cataclysmic historical change.
• The ending of The Caucasian Chalk Circle is almost optimistic.
• Brecht thought that actors should show that characters make choices and it could have gone the other way. That triggers in the audience a reflection on their own choices and what would happen if …

Interview with Tom Kuhn: Part 6

Tom Kuhn is Professor of Twentieth-Century German Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College. His main research interests are in political literature in the 20th century. He has worked particularly on Bertolt Brecht, and is the series editor of the main English-language edition of Brecht’s works.

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

• Theatrical style
• The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
• Key collaborations with other artists
• Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing

PC: I think it is a fundamental misunderstanding of Brecht to say that there is no emotion in his theatre.

TK: Yes, that’s something that really annoys me.

PC: Could you tell me a little about how emotion was created by Brecht’s actors through the observation of the social condition? How does that differ from Stanislavski’s work on acting?

TK: The distinction that the director Di Trevis made when I worked with her, and the distinction that her actors understood from the work that they were doing, was the distinction between working from the outside in, and working from the inside out. What they understood as Stanislavski’s method was to imagine a psychology of a character, providing a back story in psychological terms for an individual, so that you have an individual psychology in your head and you try to act out of that. Whereas what Di was trying to persuade them to do was to observe the way in which people behave and hold themselves and physically interact. So very much the outside. To observe people as examples of a particular social situation and to act out of that instead. Now of course the two meet in the middle, but I think that is the distinction. So that if you start from the outside you don’t end up with a character that has no psychology, and you don’t necessarily end up with a caricature either or a stereotype, although I think types and caricatures are much closer to the Brechtian understanding and they’re not out of place in Brecht’s theatre at all. Whereas they are completely out of place in a Naturalist theatre. And if you start from a psychology then you may also start to discover the social conditions which create that psychology. So the two can meet, but it is those very different starting points which seem to be the key to the work that she was doing. Does that make sense?

PC: Absolutely, it makes sense. I think that the distinction is clearest with earlier Stanislavski theory, the ones that had such an influence on Lee Strasberg’s Method acting. However, it is fascinating to see the similarities with Stanislavski’s later ideas for physical actions being the starting point for character. His idea was that the actors started with the observable, outside actions, even before reading the text. But like you say the distinction is clearest in the outcomes: Stanislavski used observable, outside actions so that the actor could inhabit the role. Brecht used observable, outside actions so that the actor could capture an accurate social condition, even a stereotype, as long as it served the social/political purpose of the play.

TK: Yeah, but I think there is a definite a distinction. I don’t think the difference is that huge and obviously both men shifted their ground. The idea that there is such a big conflict between them is strategic for Brecht. He wants to be different from Stanislavski. What is more, by the time of Brecht’s work with his newly founded Berliner Ensemble at the beginning of the 1950s, Brecht was a suspect thinker for the authorities of the German Democratic Republic. They needed to think of themselves as followers of the Russian model, and they even staged a big Stanislavski conference in Berlin with part of the motivation being to knock Brecht into shape and get him to toe the line. Therefore, in the context, insisting on the difference became very important, whereas in another context that might not have seemed so important.

PC: And this desire to be different influenced Brecht’s ideas on acting.

TK: Yes. Brecht is always warding off the psychological. His plays are full of spilt characters and slightly caricatured characters. Quite the reverse of psychologically realistic characters. He quite liked comic actors as well, because they don’t get caught up in the psychology of their characters so much. They are much more likely to act slightly over the heads of their characters, to insist on a distinction between actor and character. He loved Charlie Chaplin because he demonstrated the little man rather than being the little man. And that idea that there is a divorce between the actor and the part he’s playing is quite important for Brecht’s ideas. Ernst Busch is one of his favourites, and Helene Weigel of course. Both gave us archetypal demonstrations of the sorts of people they are playing, rather than becoming those people. It’s much more about showing than being. I think part of that comes again from this attention to external movement, behaviour, posture and things like that as an expression of something social rather than just of something psychological.

PC: Did he achieve this by getting his actors to observe people?

TK: Yes. Getting back to the pictures, Brecht’s files for his plays are full of pictures, mostly cut out of newspapers, and press photographs of the sorts of people he has in mind when he is writing. So amongst the materials for The Caucasian Chalk Circle he has a whole page stuck in an album of pictures of women refugees with babies or children slung over their shoulders. There is an archetype: of the woman with a bundle on the run; and the actress playing Grusha has to become that, rather than being a completely singular individual. You see them again crossing the Mediterranean. Brecht would have been writing about refugees again. Grusha is a refugee.

PC: That idea of collecting pictures is exactly the kind of task that students are encouraged to do in preparation for their portfolios. How did these photographs have a direct impact on actors like Helene Weigel?

TK: Well, for example: Brecht assumes that Helene Weigel had the image of a woman after the bombing of Singapore (Singapore Lament, Life Magazine, 23.03.42, photo license pending) in her mind when creating Mother Courage’s ‘silent scream’. It is a picture that he kept in several contexts, in his published collection of war time photographs – War Primer (http://goo.gl/r91UUf) and in his work journal in a different version.

Summary

• Brecht wanted his actors to observe the way in which people behave and hold themselves and physically interact.
• Actors should use people as examples of a particular social situation.
• Characters can still have a psychology if you start from the outside.
• Stereotypes and caricatures are not out of place in Brecht’s theatre.
• Brecht wanted to position his ideas as different from Stanislavski.
• Brecht liked comic actors and admired Charlie Chaplin because they don’t get caught up in the psychology of a character.
• Brecht kept files and notebooks filled with photographs that influenced his productions.