Tag: Brecht

New Brecht in Practice Resource – The Crucible

Posted on by Phil

Are you looking for full overview of Professor David Barnett’s Brecht in Practice? Click here.

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

A new major documentation of the Brechtian production of Miller’s The Crucible staged at the University of York in Oct 2017 has been added to brechtinpractice.org. There is a full visual guide through the acts and some video material, as well as several reflective pages on the various elements of the production.

This is a great resource for students and teachers studying Brechtian theatre practices and/or Miller’s play. The production offers an introduction to how a certain tradition of interpretation, with its own implied politics, can be challenged and re-presented.

New resources from the 2017 production are available here.

Get a full overview of Brecht in Practice here.

Want more on Brecht? Read our interview with Tom Kuhn here.

Tim Etchells on duality

Posted on by Phil

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This is an extract from an interview with Tim Etchells, Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment – read the full interview here.

In much of the Forced Entertainment work and in my solo practice there are moments, events, scenes, actions and texts that effectively refuse to confirm themselves as one thing or another: it’s funny but it’s not at all funny, or it’s extremely aggressive and extremely apologetic at the same time. We often, I think very deliberately, put these things in a close proximity – creating work that pushes and pulls an audience member at the same time, in two directions.

We don’t mind moments in shows where everybody laughs but we’re also quite known for those moments where a few people are laughing and other people are annoyed with them because they’re laughing. We like the tension that comes from this kind of duality.

At one level, for me, the work sets out to create situations or feelings or exchanges that aren’t reconcilable. Something is profoundly not finished or unbalanced or unanswered in what we’re doing. There’s a problematic lack of resolution in what you’re left with. A key understanding about art making for me is that it’s not so much about making statements as it is about opening space. It’s about wanting to leave the audience with a problem rather than solving it. I mean that’s Brecht of course – no catharsis, leave people questioning.

Dirty Work (The Late Shift). Photo by Hugo Glendinning
Read the full interview here.

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World Theatre Traditions – Yuan Drama (AKA Zaju)

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“By turns lyrical and earthy, sentimental and ironic, Yuan drama spans a broad emotional, linguistic, and stylistic range. Combining sung arias with declaimed verses and doggerels, dialogues and mime, and jokes and acrobatic feats, Yuan drama formed a vital part of China’s culture of performance and entertainment in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”

Hsia, C., Wai. & Kao, G. (2014). The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama. New York: Columbia University Press.

In order to understand Yuan drama we must understand the society in which it developed. Yuan society was unique in Chinese history : the entire nation was ruled by a foreign and militant tribe and its people officially divided into four ethnic groups with the Chinese at the bottom. The Mongols were the ruling class ; next were the se-mu, Moslems, Central Asians, Europeans, and other ethnic groups of the western regions ; third the han tribes of the north such as Tatars and Koreans, and those Chinese who lived in the territory of the former Chin dynasty; and lowest of all the Southerners i.e. the Chinese of the now defunct Southern Sung dynasty. These groups formed the basis for discriminatory policies and the practice of a spoils system.

Yang, R. (1958). THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF THE YÜAN DRAMA. Monumenta Serica, 17, 333.

The rise of the drama during the Yuan period, has been attributed to various causes. Some scholars believe it was a direct result of the examinations which required skill in composing songs. This theory has been challenged by modern scholars, among whom Wang Kuo-wei:

“The abolition of the examination was the real reason for the development of the drama. Since T’ang and Sung competitive scholars had been accustomed to the examinations. When the examinations were suddenly abolished the scholars no longer had an outlet for their talents; hence they turned their energies whole-heartedly to (the composition of) dramatical arias. Moreover, the requirement for the examinations on subjects during the Chin period had been most simple and shallow. These scholars once they lost what they were used to do, were unable to contribute much to other works of scholarship. For serious essays and documentary writings were not what they were familiar with. At this moment, the new style of drama appeared, and many turned their attention to it. When one or two gifted scholars devoted their entire talents to this new style, the writings of Yuan drama became a unique achievement.”

A third theory is advanced by Shionoya On:

“The Chinese people had always held the teachings of Con- fucius in high esteem, and Confucianism had been regarded as the foundation of both government and religion. But neither the Chin (Tatars) nor the Yuan (Mongols), conquerors who arose from the north, were capable of understand- ing and appreciating Confucian teachings and they allowed considerable freedom of thought in all religions, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity alike. The Chinese people, humiliated by the rule of foreign tribes, sought com- fort and consolation in poetry and wine. They took great delight in the newly developed form through which they could express their indignation against their own oppressors by poking fun at characters of the past. They criticised their world with passion and through satire admonished the people. Those who heard generally developed a sense of sympathy and satisfaction.”

Yang, R. (1958). THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF THE YÜAN DRAMA. Monumenta Serica, 17, 332 – 333

In 1995, Grant Shen directed Freed by a Flirt, the world’s first zaju opera in English. In translating the Chinese libretto into English, he preserved as many stylistic features of zaju as possible.

Read more articles by Grant Shen here.

Two English versions of The West Wing. Introduction taken from The Octant.

For a Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) opera, The West Wing (西厢记), written by Wang Shifu, is surprisingly racy, making it the most-performed, as well as the most-banned play in the history of Chinese opera. Now, a group of Yale-NUS College students are staging several scenes from this classic, marking the first time since the mid-Ming dynasty that parts of the original Yuan text are being performed. A separate cast will be performing the English translation of the play.

The West Wing tells the story between two lovers, Oriole and Zhang Sheng, who consummate their love despite parental disapproval. It was deemed immoral, pornographic even, by Confucian scholars and hence was banned for a long period of time in China.

Chinese version of The West Wing

Littlewood: Music, Stanislavski and Laban in Performance

Posted on by Phil

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.

Brecht’s Legacy and Influence

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Tom Kuhn: Part 8

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

  • Influence
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing

PC: What or who has Brecht influenced?

TK: Is it in the making of theatre or in the writing of plays that we’re looking for the influence or is it specifically in politics? I would say politically he has had the least influence. But in the making and writing of theatre he has had a huge influence. Okay, the making of theatre perhaps we should leave to one side as we have talked a bit about that already. And we shouldn’t just be British in this, we should look more widely. In Germany, a generation of writers like Dürrenmatt, already in the 1950s and 60s, but then later figures like Heiner Müller above all, are obviously very explicitly influenced by Brecht. They tried to take Brecht a stage further, with greater or lesser success. I mean I am not a great fan of Dürrenmatt, I think of his work as sort of a sub-Brecht rather than a next stage. Then in Britain the wave of influence comes a lot later, but you could say the whole generation of Howard Brenton, David Hare and David Edgar, people like that, are influenced by Brecht’s plays and to a certain extent by the idea of a political theatre of that nature. Hare said that he didn’t like Brecht but there are nonetheless similarities. And all of them have done translations of Brecht’s plays or adaptations at sometime or another. In the next generation, Tony Kushner in the United States says that he always goes back to Brecht and thinks of Brecht as a huge influence. Mark Ravenhill who wrote Shopping and Fucking also thinks of Brecht as a sort of father figure of his own theatre. You can also look beyond Britain, Germany and the US: Brecht’s influence on the writing of drama and the making of theatre is huge in India and in South America and in parts of East Asia. To a certain extent his politics are more readily accessible and his models of society make more sense in a developing economy than they do in a very advanced capitalist economy. You can see the contradictions and the conflicts more directly in developing economies, so he is popular there.

PC: Augusto Boal?

TK: Yeah Boal is another very important example.

PC: Boal is interesting as a kind of collision with naturalism as invisible theatre is almost uber-naturalism: spectactors become performers in reality. He represents a cross over.

TK: Brecht was also already interested in this kind of ‘spectactor’ with the Lehrstück experiments around 1930. In The Decision or The Measures Taken the chorus was all 400 members of the audience who were coached in the songs before the play started, so they were spectactors.

PC: That reminds me of some verbatim theatre at the moment – Little Revolution by Alecky Blythe. It is a response to the London riots. They had members of the community caught in the events that were performing in a play where all the words were verbatim from the community.

TK: Brecht’s theatre is very experimental and he takes experiments in different directions. All the plays are extraordinarily different in their structure, their dramaturgy, their whole texture and feel, one rich in its language the other deliberately pared down and impoverished in its language. He is always trying different things and in a way you could look for a legacy as vague as: intelligent socially engaged experiment; anyone who is engaged in intelligent socially experimental theatre is carrying Brecht forward in some way or another. And of course there are lots of different versions of that, and if he were still around he would be practicing lots of different versions of that too.

PC: I know you are more textual scholar but do you ever get theatre makers to respond to your research?

TK: I have very little experience of working in the theatre at all. The only person I have really worked with is Di Trevis. I have known her for years. She has been very amenable to trying things out for me. The most recent thing that we have done was realise a production of a play which Brecht himself never finished, which is just a load of fragments, but really a load of fragments, a pile of mess in the archive, hardly any worked out scenes, it is not an unfinished play, you can’t even see what the plot was supposed to be. I tried to make it into a play and she tried to make it into play in the theatre, and that is a very recent experience. It hugely informed the way I will write about that play – it is called Fatzer by the way – in future; well I’ll be doing an English edition of it for a start, which will be informed by the script that we arrived at. I’ll also be writing about it as a project that failed and why it failed and what we should draw from its failure. Because lots of sort of more sophisticated literary critics write about it very much as a post-modern fragment, as if Brecht were deliberately sitting down to write a fragment, whereas I think the practical work in the theatre brought out absolutely clearly that in 1926, when he started working on it, he sat down to write a play but it got derailed and fell apart.

PC: Forced Entertainment are a company working currently that explore the fragmentary nature of storytelling and society. Their work is sometimes deliberately unfinished and actively presents failure. But you don’t think that Brecht himself had such post-modern intentions with the play you have worked on?

TK: It is clear that Brecht was always aiming for something much more finished. Whatever we may think about Brechtian form, although it is different from play to play, once he began he mostly had a pretty strong sense of the direction in which something was going to develop. He was very dependent on the big speech really. His dialogue is not very fragmented at all, in comparison with some modern playwrights, certainly in comparison with Tony Kushner – he can write amazing scenes in which nobody ever finishes a sentence – Brecht never did that – his is much more a literary enterprise tied to the traditions of the time.

Summary

  • Politically Brecht has had the least influence. But in the making and writing of theatre he has had a huge influence.
  • You can see the contradictions and the conflicts more directly in developing economies, so Brecht is popular there.
  • A kind of ‘spectactor’ found in Augusto Boal’s work can be found in Brecht’s Lehrstück experiments around 1930.
  • Anyone who is engaged in intelligent socially experimental theatre is carrying Brecht forward in some way or another.
  • It is clear that Brecht was always aiming for something much more finished rather than exploring what leaving something unfinished means.
  • Brecht was very dependent on the big speech. He takes a literary approach tied to the traditions of the time.

Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Posted on by Phil

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

Posted on by Phil

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.

Brecht: Verfremdung is a Funny Word

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Tom Kuhn: Part 5

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 purpose
  • Influence
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice

PC: Brecht took many ideas from historical theatre conventions and experimented with them in his own work. Many of the conventions have a connection with this elusive and somewhat confusing term: Verfremdung. My definition is: the process of moving an audience from identification to detachment. What do you think of this definition?

TK: Yeah, using identification is perhaps a little over-stating it. But I don’t think it is completely wrong. It is rather more from sympathy than from empathy. I would say that Brecht is quite wary of identifying with a character. But yes it is taking you from something recognisable to moving outside. Or the other way round as well: showing you something which seems completely strange and then suddenly you recognise things and think, “hang on, this isn’t different to the world I know.”

But Verfremdung is a funny word. People make the mistake of thinking Brecht is a systematic thinker, a philosopher, but Verfremdung is a word that he starts using before he has actually entirely decided what it means, and then he gradually tries it out. It is experimental again. How am I going to make this word do some work for me? And then eventually, and this is terribly important, it starts to crystallise absolutely around social phenomena. People also sometimes forget, when they’re talking about Brecht, with all this talk about epic theatre and songs interrupting the action and being able to see the lighting in the theatre and all of those sorts of things, they forget that the whole purpose of this is to analyse social phenomena. Brecht is interested in politics and society, so to call a modern production of something ‘Brechtian’ simply because it uses some of those outward characteristics is really missing the point, unless it has that social/political edge. That was what it was all about as far as he was concerned. So Verfremdung came to mean not just that alternating experience of sympathy and distance, of the strange and the familiar, but was absolutely a path to understanding the social condition that we are in, the social circumstances of his characters and actions.

Summary

  • Brecht wasn’t a systematic thinker or a philosopher.
  • Brecht started using the word Verfremdung before he had decided what it meant for the theatre.
  • It came to mean understanding the social condition by moving an audience from something they recognise to a state of detachment. Or the other way around.
  • The whole purpose of Verfremdung is to analyse society.
  • Theatre that is described as ‘Brechtian’ must have a social/political edge.

Brecht’s Dramatic Structure and Design

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Tom Kuhn: Part 4

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

  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Theatrical style
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice

PC: What were Brecht’s ideas for structure and flow?

TK: If you were to ask another, more conservative early 20th century theorist for an account of drama I suppose they would give you a vision of classical drama with an exposition, a development, a crisis and a dénouement. And that sweeps you through as an emotional experience to probably some sort of catharsis at the end. Brecht wants to interrupt all of that and make that impossible and he does it in big ways and in little ways. The Caucasian Chalk Circle gives that wonderful example of a big way saying, “we’re going to interrupt the story here and give you the back story of this other character, Azdak, whose relevance at this point is completely obscure.” That’s a big interruption in that flow. But there are also little ones simply when characters step out of character, step forward and address the audience directly. That is also a sort of break in the flow, giving us a different perspective on events.

PC: So there were multiple perspectives in his plays?

TK: Yes. Brecht liked Chinese art, as well as late-medieval/early Renaissance art, and one of the things he liked about Chinese art was that it doesn’t give you a single perspective; Chinese art tends not to give a single focal point or a point of view. Instead you get these landscapes with multiple perspectives. Brecht quite liked that, and perhaps you can understand some of the interruptions in his plays, for songs and other character’s points of view, as a sort of perspectival interruption in the action. He wanted us to suddenly see something from a different point of view. A good example in Mother Courage is when her son is executed and she has to deny that she recognises him. It is a completely heart-rending moment, a very emotional moment. People sometimes think there is not much emotion in Brecht. They are wrong. There’s loads. This is a very emotional moment, but then immediately afterwards we get a scene that changes the point of view entirely. Mother Courage is trying to get back into business, so rather than carrying that emotional charge forwards, the emotional charge is broken off and we suddenly see her life from a different point of view. Brecht enables us perhaps to reflect on what has happened in a more intelligent way than we would do if we were emotionally caught up with it. So those emotional moments aren’t carried forward, they are not intensified by the action, they are rather interrupted and broken off by it.

PC: How about medieval tapestries with their collection of stories on one fabric?

TK: Absolutely. Late medieval religious art was very important for Brecht. He was brought up in Augsburg which is a predominantly Catholic but also a Protestant town. He was of mixed parentage himself so he had access to both but was brought up as a Protestant. So he saw the Catholic church from outside which is interesting.

PC: How did Brecht use visual art to trigger ideas for productions?

TK: Caspar Neher is the childhood friend and collaborator who developed the whole look of the Brechtian theatre. What we think of as the Brecht Curtain – the light half curtain – Brecht himself called it the ‘Neher Curtain’. You really need the two of them together when you think about the visual image of what Brecht’s theatre looks like. Neher worked on nearly all, maybe 90% of Brecht productions until 1933. Then Neher stayed in Nazi Germany and continued to work as a director, and Brecht of course left. When he returned to Switzerland, the first person he got in touch with was Caspar Neher. Neher is absolutely central.

Summary

  • Brecht doesn’t want his audience to be carried through a story on an overall emotional journey. He wants to make catharsis impossible.
  • Brecht wants to present emotion but then interrupt it.
  • Brecht was influenced by multiple perspectives in Chinese art and late medieval art.
  • Brecht’s childhood friend and designer, Caspar Neher is absolutely central to his idea of theatre