Grotowski’s Work with Text

Interview with Paul Allain

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Since collaborating with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 he has gone on to write extensively about the theatre. He has published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.

Paul’s films about physical acting for Methuen Drama Bloomsbury will be published at Drama Online in Spring 2018 as Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z.  Draft films are currently available at the Digital Performer website.

email: P.A.Allain@kent.ac.uk


Connections to the IB, GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • theatrical style
  • innovations
  • key collaborations with other artists
  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing

PC: How did Grotowski work with the actors to articulate the role? Jennifer Kumiega cites Raymonde Temkine’s description of the process of articulating a role.

Raymonde Temkine has described what she calls ‘articulation of the role’ in Grotowski’s productions as a three-part process: initial structuring, performed by Grotowski on an original text; a collective phase of elaboration, involving a great deal of spontaneous creative work; and finally the structured composition of the role into a ‘system of signs’.

Kumiega, J., The Theatre of Grotowski (Methuen, 1987)

What initial structuring did Grotowski do on the text?

PA: He had a very strong dramaturgical influence from Ludwik Flaszen, his collaborator, who had helped with adapting some of the texts. His relationship with text was very different from Stanislavski’s.

PC: Who is Ludwik Flaszen?

PA: Flaszen is a well known Polish critic who was a hugely respected national figure before he even worked with Grotowski. He had been quite critical of Grotowski’s student work when he had seen it in Kraków. Flaszen was offered a theatre in Opole: The Theatre of Thirteen Rows, a very small theatre. He invited Grotowski to run it with him. Even though he had questioned Grotowski’s work, he could see he had some potential. Ludwik Flaszen depicts himself as devil’s advocate to Grotowski’s work in his book Grotowski and Company. He was a principle figure in the founding of the company and actually took charge when Grotowski emigrated in 1982. His work has not been given enough recognition so it is important that Grotowski and Company came out. Flaszen, for example, coined the term ‘Poor Theatre’.

PC: How did he work with Grotowski on the structuring of the text?

PA: Sometimes they did a text in full but more often than not, as in The Constant Prince, they would remove certain characters, take out some scenes, simplify it for their small ensemble. It was a process of condensing and distillation. I think a lot of this work was done initially by Flaszen and then in consultation with Grotowski. It was very much a collaboration.

PC: People often see Grotowski as quite a domineering director.

PA: It is a common but false assumption that Grotowski was a director whose vision was total. Grotowski put out this statement which is at the beginning of Voices from Within where he wanted to correct this view:

“In our productions next to nothing is dictated by the director. His role in the preparatory stages is to stimulate the creative associations for which the impulse comes from the actors and to organize the final structure in which they assume a specific shape.”

I think people were sometimes using him as an excuse to themselves be a demagogic, auteur director in a way that he wasn’t. It is interesting when you read the interviews in Voices From Within with members of the company; they say he was very empathetic, he was very tough but they respected him and he gave them a lot of space.

PC: How did they go about finding texts?

PA: In the last piece, Apocalypsis cum Figuris, the actors were set tasks to go and find texts that suited the action they were developing. They would develop proposals, sort of propositions, small etudes. Grotowski would then look at them and say, “That works, I believe that. That doesn’t work, go and find that text.” He set them tasks, reading tasks to bring in material and then he would shape it. He’d construct the whole score, which was very difficult and not always a very happy process.

PC: How did he go about constructing the score with text?

PA: Grotowski worked with opposition in a Stanislavskian way: if you wanted to find someone’s greed, look for their generosity; don’t play greed in general. In The Constant Prince, the physical action is of someone being tortured, but what did Cieślak work on with Grotowski? His feelings of love, sweet delight and ecstasy; completely contrasting emotions. The idea of apotheosis [meaning: a perfect example of its type] and derision comes up a lot in Grotowski’s work: you set something up and then you bring it down. Nothing is sacred. These holy cows can be suddenly destroyed in a moment; he constructed an oppositional dialectic: for Cieślak in The Constant Prince it is between torture and ecstasy. They were always trying to find texts which go against the action, which worked as a layer. They were building a montage if you like. The actors were responsible for finding those because it was coming out of their process of work and their investigation. It wasn’t predetermined.

PC: Why was that not a happy process?

PA: It was a research process, you don’t always know what you’re getting, you need to reach the bottom to then break through. He asked his actors to go through the clichés, go through exhaustion because only then do you find something of value. That need for exhaustion can be seen as being masochistic. However, it can take a certain level of exhaustion to find something new and fresh, to pull on resources that you didn’t know you had. In sports and adventure we hear that idea all the time, but you don’t think of it in relation to theatre. Taking people with you, as Grotowski did, letting them know it’s okay to be lost is very hard. There were times when they struggled, they lost their direction but then they had a breakthrough. Grotowski had that ability to be patient and accept moments of failure, of doubt, but then pick people up and take them with him.

Full interview here:

Grotowski

Grotowski’s Reply to Stanislavski

Interview with Paul Allain

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Since collaborating with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 he has gone on to write extensively about the theatre. He has published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.

Paul’s films about physical acting for Methuen Drama Bloomsbury will be published at Drama Online in Spring 2018 as Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z.  Draft films are currently available at the Digital Performer website.

email: P.A.Allain@kent.ac.uk


Connections to the IB, GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • innovations
  • key collaborations with other artists
  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • use of theatrical conventions
  • influence
  • significant moments in the development of theory and practice

PC: What were his early influences?

PA: There are lots of routes into Grotowski’s work. One is his connection with Stanislavski. In 1955, he was studying at GITIS in Moscow, one of the main Russian drama schools. Grotowski worked with Yuri Zavadsky, who had come out of the Stanislavskian tradition. People often see Stanislavski and Grotowski as being opposed; that is a real mistake. Grotowski wrote this text, Reply to Stanislavski in 1983 in Polish. It was only published in English in 2008 in The Drama Review. He explains how he’d been influenced by Stanislavski after studying him in Moscow and how he was carrying on the work ‘On Physical Actions’ that Stanislavski had left unfinished when he died.

Many people have difficulties distinguishing technique from aesthetics. So then: I consider Stanislavsky’s method one of the greatest stimuli for the European theatre, especially in actor education; at the same time I feel distant from his aesthetics. Stanislavsky’s aesthetics were a product of his times, his country, and his person. We are all a product of the meeting of our tradition with our needs. These are things that one cannot transplant from one place to another without falling into clichés, into stereotypes, into something that is already dead the moment we call it into existence. It is the same for Stanislavsky as for us, and for anybody else.

Grotowski, J., & Salata, K. (2008). Reply to Stanislavsky. TDR (1988-), 52(2), p.31.

His interest in Stanislavski was underpinned by the phrase ‘I don’t believe you’ which they both used. Grotowski’s is actually quite a Stanislavskian psychophysical technique but much more movement orientated.

PC: Can you pinpoint where Grotowski’s aesthetics differ?

PA: Grotowski wasn’t starting from interpreting or staging plays, he wasn’t working with characters; he was working with roles.

PC: What is the difference between Stanislavski working on characters and Grotowski working on roles?

PA: Grotowski says the role should be like a ‘scalpel’ for opening up the person, the actor. It is really about using theatre as a way of revealing the person not the person identifying with the character.

PC: Is there an example that can illustrate that difference?

PA: When Cieślak played the role of the Constant Prince in the eponymous play it is all based on his memories of the first time he fell in love with a girl as a teenager. He and Grotowski spent nine months reconstructing the score, the inner life, of this awakening feeling. They reconstructed these feelings of passion, of erotic desire, of prohibition as a young Catholic boy where feeling these things was sinful. The narrative is of the Constant Prince being tortured by the Moors: a horrible story, based on the Calderón de la Barca play. The torture ends with the Prince’s death, because he doesn’t give in: he’s constant. We see that story but, without knowing it, we experience this whole other life intuitively. It was a physical realisation of what Stanislavski called the ‘inner life’. Grotowski combined the musicality and plasticity of Meyerhold with a Stanislavskian psychological process. It was never about true to life character, it was about revealing something of the actor.

Up Next:

Part 3: Grotowski Burning at the Stake After Artaud

Part 4: Grotowski’s Significant Productions

Part 5: Grotowski and Gurawski: Configuring the Space

Part 6: Grotowski Inspired Creativity and Outrage

Part 7: Grotowski’s Work with Text

Part 8: Grotowski’s Communication with Spectators

Part 9: Acting for Grotowski: What is it to be Human?

Part 10: Grotowski Composes Associations: Plastique and Corporal Exercises

Part 11: Grotowski’s Voice Work: Connecting Body and Voice

Part 12: Grotowski’s Context: Sickness, War and Oppression

Part 13: Paratheatre: What is Beyond Theatre?

Part 14: Paratheatre: Finding the Desire to Change

Part 15: Grotowski’s Influence: Barba, Brook and Beyond

FULL INTERVIEW HERE

Littlewood: Music, Stanislavski and Laban in Performance

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Influence
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Innovations
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Theatrical style
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: Stanislavski put a lot of emphasis on the idea of tempo/rhythm and again I see that in Littlewood’s work with Eurhythmics. Originally it was a theory for music, was music used in Theatre Workshop rehearsals? And how was it important in productions?

NH: Music became increasingly a part of productions, and songs certainly, when she started collaborating with Lionel Bart in Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. She used a jazz band, famously on A Taste Of Honey stage. I’m not sure about rehearsals, I’m not aware that they did, but I think that they must have done in terms of the movement work that Jean Newlove did. Newlove trained and worked with Laban and then she joined Theatre Workshop and became their principal movement teacher.

PC: Was she scouted because of her interest in Laban?

NH: She wasn’t scouted she turned up, from memory, to one of the workshops they did when they were in Ormesby Hall and she ended up getting together with Ewan MacColl and marrying him. So it was a personal, as well as a professional thing. But she got taken on for her connections with Laban and being able to do the movement training that Littlewood and MacColl were cobbling together themselves up to that point. Now they then had someone who was an expert to do it properly.

PC: Was she influenced by Brecht’s work?

NH: Not so much consciously. They did do a production of Mother Courage. They got the rights to do the British premiere of it, which was a disaster. He only gave the rights if she would perform Mother Courage because she did perform in the early days. She didn’t want to do it and she did a poor job. It was done in Barnstaple in Devon and that was it. So no not consciously, I think she found it quite cold, which I don’t necessarily agree with but she found it as an overly intellectual theatre.

PC: Interesting that that unfortunate perception of Brecht still stands for so many. Can we talk about specific actors? Who was her leading female actress?

NH: Avis Bunnage often took the main roles.

PC: And leading male actors?

NH: Harry H. Corbett, the son from the TV programme Steptoe and Son. He was married to Avis, in the early years they came as a package. Richard Harris started off doing Theatre Workshop stuff as well. Howard Goorney who wrote The Theatre Workshop Story was always in those early pieces and trained as part of the company, I think he was part of the 1930s group and stayed all the way along. Murray Melvin, was Geoff in A Taste Of Honey and he was in Oh What A Lovely War. He is still the archivist at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East now.

PC: How important is improvisation as part of process in Littlewood’s work?

NH: Improvisation was used as a way of trying to make things real in performance. For A Taste of Honey she had Avis Bunnage and Frances Cuka walking around the theatre for hours carrying really heavy suitcases, getting them to improvise arguing with landlords and landladies, getting wet, waiting for buses, you know, arriving places, getting closed doors, moving on. Then they started working on the opening scene when they arrive in the bedsit. So they used improvisation as a way of getting to a truth, a realness on stage. So that was in the preparation for performance.

PC: These long preparatory improvisations to reach a truth, a realness, have parallels with Grotowski and his via negativa approach.

NH: Clive Barker, who was part of Theatre Workshop and wrote the book Theatre Games, talks about her using via negativa as well. Try this, try this. Never try it LIKE this. Try it again, try it again until you find the right moment. He linked that to Grotowski. That doesn’t necessarily suggest that it was a direct influence but it was a similar use of the technique.

PC: Did she feel that she had to strip over-trained actors back for them to be able to perform in her work?

NH: She just wouldn’t take them.

PC: So she knew the type of person that would be able to do it. What were the actors reactions to the continuous training?

NH: They completely bought into it initially. The initial company were an ensemble, they wanted to train and they wanted to work in this different way: they were a merry band of brothers: joining together with a common purpose. I think later on at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East it became quite a shock for actors coming in because she wouldn’t want to do a traditional audition process. Murray Melvin tells a lovely story of coming into audition for her and she said “Do you have your speeches prepared? Yeah. Do you want to do them? No. Let’s not bother then just tell me a story.” For her it was about courage. Another actor tells a story about her throwing a script at them and saying, “Right I want you to read all the parts. What? But I want to read the part… No I want you to read all of them: men women, children old men, young women” And he did and felt ridiculous and probably looked ridiculous but her response was “well if you can do that and you’re prepared to make a fool of yourself then you’d probably be a very good actor.” Another well known story is of Barbara Windsor meeting the cleaner scrubbing the steps of the Theatre Royal: they were chatting, then it turned out the cleaner was Joan Littlewood and she got the job at that moment. There are loads of great stories! Victor Spinetti who was the MC in OH What A Lovely War, she picked him, after he was compering in a strip joint. So she picked people up in strange places. She’s not going to go and pick up someone who’s RADA trained. She was more likely to go and get people from the variety or the clubs. She wanted actors with that curiosity and a willingness to play and take risks. If you weren’t prepared to do some training then what was the point? The spirit of experimentation was important. 

Summary

  • Music was an important part of performance and rehearsals.
  • They got the rights to do the British premiere of Brecht’s Mother Courage but it was a disaster. She found Brecht rather cold and overly intellectual.
  • Improvisation was used as a way of trying to make things real in performance.
  • The initial company were an ensemble, they wanted to train and they wanted to work in this different way.
  • Littlewood made sure she got the actors she wanted by searching strange places and conducting unconventional auditions.

Littlewood’s Actor Training – The Composite Mind

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

email: n.holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Theatrical purpose
  • Innovations
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Influence
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: What was Littlewood’s approach to training actors?

NH: In the commercial theatre at the time you went off as an actor and did your actors’ training; then you would finish your actors’ training; then you would act; then you get your script, you would learn your part then you would perform your roles. In contrast, Littlewood believed that you always kept training and that was a big thing that distinguished her from other directors at the time and still! So always, in those very early years up to the mid-1950s, they were still doing daily movement training; vocal training; improvising; doing Stanislavski exercises. She’s doing things that would always keep the actors on their toes. Laban was hugely influential on Littlewood. That sense of wanting the actors to constantly be thinking about how they move their bodies in space. What that means in terms of weight, flow, speed, rhythm. Equally vocally: having a dexterous voice and being able to manipulate that. Not just coming on stage doing your lines and off you go. Instead her actors were really grounded, fully thinking, creative people. Not only training them as individual actors but also instilling a belief in collaboration. She had this phrase ‘the composite mind’ – I think it is an important one. The importance of collaboration: that theatre is something that is done together. You needed to learn that; you needed to learn that as an ensemble. The ensemble wasn’t something in the British theatre tradition at the time, you had a company and you hired your actors for that particular production. Companies didn’t work in that ensemble way, in the way that Littlewood wanted them to do: training the actors.

PC: Is there a pinpoint moment when she discovered Stanislavski in particular and Laban?

NH: Really early!

PC: Before Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood’s first English translation of 1937?

NH: I don’t think that it was pre-that translation but she was certainly using it in the 1940s. I have seen some of her early notebooks and she is absolutely ripping off An Actor Prepares! Doing workshop notes of things that she is going to do and giving lectures on Stanislavski to people who turn up to do her sessions. So she would run this quite ad-hoc training thing.

PC: I think the dates of those Hapgood translations offer real insight into how advanced Littlewood’s training methods were. Benedetti’s introduction to the most recent translations explains how the staggered translation of Stanislavski’s writing led to massive misunderstanding of his theories on training.

Hapgood’s Stanislavski translation – dates of publication:

An Actor Prepares – 1937

Building a Character – 1950

Creating a Role – 1961

The first book covers the first year of Stanislavski’s proposed course and talks about the more psychological and cerebral methods, whereas the second and third bring have an emphasis on physical action. The circumstance of publication, the growth of the American Method, as well as a simple neglect of those last two texts led many to overplay the idea of Stanislavski as cerebral and psychological in approach rather than rooted in the physical. So for Littlewood to combine the psychological strategies of An Actor Prepares with Laban and Meyerhold’s physical approaches was truly innovative. This combination has now become common place with actor training and the development of ‘physical theatre’.

NH: Yes this three-pronged approach of Stanislavski, Laban and Meyerhold is innovative and influential. You wouldn’t think that they had a relationship with each other but they absolutely do in Littlewood’s practice.

Summary

  • Littlewood believed that you always kept training and that was a big thing that distinguished her from other directors at the time and still!
  • Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares influenced Littlewood’s approach to training and rehearsal.
  • Laban was hugely influential on Littlewood. That sense of wanting the actors to constantly be thinking about how they move their bodies in space.
  • Meyerhold’s Biomechanics also influenced her work on physicality and movement.
  • Littlewood’s combination of the psychological strategies in An Actor Prepares with Laban and Meyerhold’s physical approaches was truly innovative.

Littlewood’s Approaches to Texts and Devising

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth: Part 4

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

email: n.holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • Influence
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Social, cultural, political and historical context

PC: Is there a clear difference in her work with text compared to her devised pieces?

NH: Yes. The form was always about making it work with the text, so whatever the text required was the form that was made. Or in terms of the more improvised pieces like Oh What a Lovely War or earlier plays like John Bullion it was about the best relationship between the different elements of production. Derek Paget uses a term collision montage which I think is a really lovely way of talking about that work. She constantly reordered scenes making something like Oh What A Lovely War, to see what was going to have the most impact: put that next to that, what does that do? Try it again here, what does that do?

PC: I know that Littlewood was very playful with her actors: was her experimentation with form rooted solely in her playfulness or was it rooted in a research and understanding of the theatre?

NH: I think it changes given the different contexts she was working in.

  • In the beginning the impetus was political
  • then it moved through to wanting to make really vivid theatrical imagery
  • then the idea of the authentic working class voice becomes more important (A Taste of Honey, You Won’t Always Be On Top and Brendan Behan’s plays)
  • Then she shifts into wanting to be much more improvisational, breaking down that relationship between the auditorium and the stage space with interruptions and humour to develop a relationship with the audience.
  • Then after Oh What a Lovely War she gets completely bored with theatre and theatre spaces full stop and she starts doing community projects for kids and makes plans for this big cultural centre – the Fun Palace. This idea lives on in the Fun Palace events run across the world at the start of October led by co-directors Stella Duffy and Sarah-Jane Rawlings.

So yes there is definitely the sense of her anarchic spirit driving these shifts but it is also about her ever growing knowledge of the theatre that never allowed her work to stay still.

Summary

  • Littlewood constantly reordered scenes making something like Oh What A Lovely War, to see what was going to have the most impact. Derek Paget uses a term collision montage.
  • Littlewood’s anarchic spirit drove shifts in her approach but changes always came about with her ever growing knowledge of the theatre.

 

Brecht’s The 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.

Grunewald_Isenheim1 Grunewald_Isenheim1 John the Baptist

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 …

Brecht and Emotion: His ideas on acting

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.