Unwin The Complete Brecht Toolkit

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78001-386-2
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

A practical, hands-on guide - for actors, directors, teachers and students - to Brecht's theory and practice of theatre, with a full set of exercises to help put theory into practice. The Complete Brecht Toolkit examines, one by one, Brecht's many, sometimes contradictory ideas about theatre - and how he put them into practice. Here are explanations of all the famous key terms, such as Alienation Effect, Epic Theatre and Gestus, as well as many others which go to make up what we think of as 'Brechtian theatre'. The book also explores the practical application of these theories in Acting, Language, Music, Design and Direction. Also included are fifty exercises contributed by Julian Jones, to help student actors investigate Brecht's ideas for themselves, becoming thoroughly familiar with the tools in the Brecht toolkit.

Stephen Unwin is one of the UK's leading theatre and opera directors. He founded English Touring Theatre in 1993 and opened the Rose Theatre Kingston in 2008, becoming Artistic Director until 2014. He has written guides to Shakespeare's and Brecht's plays, as well as to Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, and Twentieth-Century Drama. He is also the author of The Complete Brecht Toolkit and So You Want To Be A Theatre Director? As a writer for the stage, his work includes: Laughing Boy, adapted from Sara Ryan's book Justice for Laughing Boy (Jermyn Street Theatre, London, 2024) and All Our Children (Jermyn Street Theatre, 2017). He is a campaigner for the rights and opportunities of people with learning disabilities and was appointed the Chair of KIDS in November 2016, the national charity providing services to disabled children, young people and their families.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Unwin, Stephen

Leseproben

2

In Theory

2

In Theory

WHY THEORY?

This book has been written for those many young actors, directors and writers who are drawn to Brecht’s theatre and want to take up the ‘Brecht challenge’ into the twenty-first century. I’m aware that they may feel daunted by the extensive theory that confronts the student of Brecht, and my aim in this chapter is to clarify what he meant by the key terms. If I quote from the theory at length it’s because I think we should read what Brecht actually wrote. In the rest of the book I will show how they can be taught and put into practice.

How to Approach It

But why is there so much theory and how should we approach it? First, we should recognise the intellectual nature of the German theatre. Even today German directors and playwrights are expected to describe their theoretical approach in detail, and the result is still highly conceptual. This contrasts with the commercial bias of the British theatre, which sets out, above all, to entertain, and where theories about writing, acting or the art of theatre are regarded with deep suspicion. There are many reasons for this – innate commercialism, the anti-intellectualism of British culture and a blithe assumption about the superiority of our theatre’s way of working – but it can make Brecht’s theory puzzling to the British reader.

And then, we need to take Brecht’s theory with a bucketful of salt: apparently, when asked whether an English production of Galileo had created the ‘alienation effect’, Weigel replied that ‘it was just a silly idea that Bert had come up with to stop his actors from overacting’. And there’s nothing worse than doctrinaire ‘Brechtian’ productions which are mere exercises in theatrical style. In other words, we’d best approach Brecht’s theoretical writings with some caution.

Above all, however, Brecht was an oppositional playwright, and shaped his theatre in reaction to what confronted him. He despised the mainstream theatre of his youth, and saw how many of its leading figures went on to support the Nazis. So it’s hardly surprising that he felt the need to issue manifestos, essays and polemics. In exile, such activity was a surrogate for directing.

Finally, we should remember just how deliberately provocative so much of the theory is. Brecht wanted to encourage people to think about society in fresh and critical ways, and his theory speaks to its audience in the same dialectical and sly way that his plays do. Provocation requires overstatement, and Brecht often sets the volume too loud. But it’s all part of his tactics.

Where to Find It

The British student is lucky that the theory is so readily available in carefully annotated and readable translations. The most important essays are A Short Organum for the Theatre and The Messingkauf Dialogues. Other key pieces can be found in Brecht on Theatre. There are notes by Brecht in the individual plays, some of which were written for the model books (see ‘A Note on the Model Books’, below) and the poems are rich with insights, as are the letters and journals. A recent volume of political essays1 makes for fascinating reading, and the important debates on aesthetics between Brecht, Lukács, Adorno and Benjamin have been assembled in Aesthetics and Politics.2

Various people have expounded on Brecht’s theory. Walter Benjamin’s Understanding Brecht is a brilliant, if occasionally dense, collection of essays on the key ideas, including two attempts at answering the question ‘What is Epic Theatre?’ John Willett’s definitive Theatre of Bertolt Brecht offers the most reliable account, and the same author’s Brecht in Context explores the work in depth. Meg Mumford wrote a useful volume on the subject,3 and my own guide to the plays includes introductory material to the theory.4 And there are, of course, numerous academic studies.

Words and Definitions

One of the many difficulties faced by the student of Brecht’s theory is the way that the various terms are so interlinked: thus it’s impossible to describe the ‘epic theatre’ without reference to the ‘alienation effect’, or ‘gestus’ without ‘contradiction’ and ‘complex seeing’. I’ve decided to define these terms individually, but they only make sense when read in conjunction with each other.

What’s more, these headline terms are surrounded by dozens of other, less significant ones – many of which are only referred to occasionally – but all of which should be studied if we are to comprehend the scale of Brecht’s achievements. And, as usual, it’s essential to see all of this within its historical context. The crucial thing to remember is that everything in Brecht is informed by his underlying – and constantly evolving – response to the world around him. As ever, we have to read Brecht historically if we are to read him at all.

THE ALIENATION EFFECT

At the heart of Brecht’s ambitions was the creation of a kind of theatre that would encourage audiences to think carefully about the society in which they lived, and decide to set about changing it. In 1940, he wrote:

So the question is this: is it quite impossible to make the reproduction of real-life events the purpose of art and thereby make something conducive of the spectators’ critical attitude toward them?

The ‘alienation effect’ – one of the most misunderstood terms in the Brechtian vocabulary – was the result.

Definitions

Strictly speaking, the German word Verfremdung should be translated as ‘making strange’ (fremd means strange): ‘alienation’ with its secondary sense of ‘being alienated’ – unpleasant, harsh and distant – has often led people to imagine that Brecht wanted a kind of theatre, and an acting style, that was cold or lacking in emotion. But ‘alienation’ (or ‘A-effect’, as it’s sometimes called) is the usual translation, and we’d best stick to it.

The ‘alienation effect’ occurs when the audience is encouraged to question its preconceptions and look at the familiar in a new and different way – that is, to make it strange. In some respects, it’s the artistic equivalent of the scientific method: just as the scientist examines natural phenomenon (an apple falling to the ground, the sun rising, heart attacks occurring) and questions traditional assumptions (the will of the apple, the movement of the sun, God’s punishment for bad deeds), so the theatre presents an event (the crowning of a king, the power of a landowner, the rise of Fascism) and helps the audience challenge received opinions about what is being shown. In the same way that science proceeds from evidence, so art – Brecht argued – should take nothing for granted. The ‘alienation effect’ was essential for such questioning.

The ‘alienation effect’ wasn’t new: Brecht took it from a huge range of sources – ‘the Chinese theatre, the Spanish classical theatre, the popular theatre of Breughel’s day and the Elizabethan theatre’.5 The key difference is the purpose for which it’s being used:

The old A-effects quite remove the object represented from the spectator’s grasp, turning it into something that cannot be altered; the new are not odd in themselves, though the unscientific eye stamps anything strange as odd. The new alienations are only designed to free socially conditioned phenomena from that stamp of familiarity which protects them against our grasp today.6

In other words, Brecht’s achievement was to adapt the ‘alienation effect’ into a style appropriate for the modern world.

In Practice

To induce the ‘alienation effect’, everyone involved in staging a production needs to know what the writer thinks about the events portrayed, and let this understanding affect every aspect of his work. This requires a level of intellectual, moral and political involvement that most modern approaches to the theatre ignore. The important point is that Brecht knew that there are many different degrees of intellectual understanding, and that the ‘alienation effect’ is only valuable if the analysis is sophisticated.

Thus, in staging Fear and Misery, Brecht’s great cycle of one-act plays about life in the pre-war Third Reich, the actors aren’t asked just to remind us that Fascism is bad; instead, he expects them to demonstrate – with forensic insight – the attraction that Fascism holds for certain people in particular situations. Unlike the modern (and frankly sentimental) emphasis on ‘positive role models’, or drama ‘from the perspective of the victims’, Brecht wanted to provoke his audience into working out why people so often do things which are not in their best interest.

Producing the ‘alienation effect’ requires a kind of double vision from the actor, who needs both to inhabit his character and remember that he is showing it. The danger with identification, Brecht argued,...