Bertolt Brecht and epic theatre as an elective topic, including verfremdungseffekt (alienation), gestus, narrative theatre, and the major plays (Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Threepenny Opera)

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to know Bertolt Brecht as a playwright and theorist, the conventions of epic theatre, the major plays, and the political and historical context. Strong answers can name conventions precisely, cite specific plays and scenes, and connect Brecht's formal innovations to his political aims.

The answer

Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (1898 to 1956). German playwright, director and theorist. Born Augsburg, Bavaria. Active in Weimar Berlin theatre from 1922. Exiled by the Nazis in 1933; lived in Scandinavia (1933 to 1941), the United States (1941 to 1947), and East Berlin from 1949. Founded the Berliner Ensemble with his wife Helene Weigel in 1949.

Brecht wrote plays, essays, theory, and poetry across three and a half decades. The body of work is large; his theoretical writings (collected in Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett, 1964) are as influential as the plays themselves.

The Weimar context

Brecht's epic theatre develops in Weimar Germany (1918 to 1933), a period of intense political and artistic experiment. The Weimar Republic was unstable: the 1923 hyperinflation, the 1929 Wall Street Crash, mass unemployment, and the rise of the Nazi Party shaped the artistic climate. Berlin in the 1920s was a centre of Expressionist film, the Bauhaus, modern music (Weill, Eisler, Schoenberg), and politically engaged theatre (Erwin Piscator's documentary stagings).

Brecht was a member of the German Communist Party from the late 1920s. His theatre was Marxist in its analysis of class and capitalist relations, although Brecht's relationship to the Party was complicated and he never wholly fit official Communist aesthetics.

Epic theatre

Brecht distinguished epic theatre from dramatic theatre. The distinction (from "Notes to Mahagonny", 1930) lays out two ideal types:

Dramatic theatre. Plot. The audience is involved. The audience's reason is exhausted. The audience experiences emotion. The world is given. Human nature is fixed.

Epic theatre. Narrative. The audience observes. The audience's reason is engaged. The audience thinks. The world is alterable. Human nature is socially conditioned.

The distinction is not absolute; Brecht acknowledged that no play is purely epic or purely dramatic. But epic theatre's tilt toward narrative, argument and reason was deliberate.

Verfremdungseffekt

The central technique. The German word combines "fremd" (strange) with the verb prefix "ver-" to produce "verfremden" (to make strange) and "verfremdung" (the making strange). English translations vary: "alienation effect", "estrangement effect", "distancing effect", "v-effect". The German is the standard reference.

Techniques that produce verfremdung:

• Direct address to the audience. Characters speak past each other to the audience.
• Visible stage machinery. Lights, ropes, sets are exposed.
• Projected captions. Scene titles projected on screens before each scene tell the audience what will happen, removing suspense and freeing the audience to think about how rather than what.
• Songs that interrupt the action. Characters step out of the realist mode to sing commentary.
• Half-curtains. A curtain on a rail covers half the stage, leaving costume changes and set changes visible.
• Visible musicians. Music is produced on stage, not from a hidden orchestra pit.
• Stylised acting. Actors signal that they are presenting a character, not becoming one. Brecht advocated a "quoting" style of acting.

Gestus

The other central concept. A "gestus" is a physical and social attitude embodied in a moment of action. The English translation often given is "gist" or "gesture in the social sense". A gestus is not a private psychological tic but a public action that reveals the social relations between characters.

Examples:

• Mother Courage haggling over the price of her son Eilif's life. A scene in which the audience watches a woman calculate the value of a child's life in cash. The gestus is the haggling itself.
• The chalk circle test in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Two women claim the same child. The judge draws a chalk circle on the ground; whichever woman pulls the child out wins. Grusha refuses to pull; the natural mother does. Grusha is awarded the child as the true mother. The gestus is the pulling itself.
• Macheath's mock wedding in The Threepenny Opera. Stolen goods, a forced clergyman, a song interrupting the ceremony. The gestus is the wedding-as-business.

The point of gestus is that it makes the social content of the action visible. The audience does not feel for the characters; the audience sees what is happening to them socially.

The major plays

The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), 1928. Music by Kurt Weill. A radical reworking of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). Set in a fictional Victorian London underworld. Macheath ("Mack the Knife") marries Polly Peachum; her father plots his arrest. The play is full of songs (the "Mack the Knife" ballad is the famous one) that break the action and comment on it. Premiered Berlin, 31 August 1928; ran for 350 performances. Cinema by G. W. Pabst (1931).

Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder), 1939, premiered Zurich 1941. Set in the Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648). Anna Fierling (Mother Courage) trades from a cart, following the armies. She loses her three children (Eilif, Swiss Cheese, Kattrin) across the play. The play examines the trader who profits from war while being destroyed by it. The Berlin Ensemble premiere (1949) with Helene Weigel as Mother Courage is the canonical production.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis), 1944, premiered USA 1948, Berlin 1954. Framed as a story told on a post-war Soviet collective farm to settle a land dispute. Grusha, a servant woman in feudal Georgia, rescues the abandoned baby of a fleeing governor's wife. After years of struggle, she is brought to court when the governor's wife returns. Judge Azdak applies the chalk circle test. The play uses the parable structure to argue that what belongs to whom is not given but produced.

The Good Person of Szechwan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan), 1943. Shen Teh, a prostitute in a fictional Chinese town, is rewarded by visiting gods for being a good person. She buys a tobacco shop. The pressures of business force her to invent a male cousin, Shui Ta, who is ruthless. The play examines whether a good person can survive in capitalist society.

Life of Galileo (Leben des Galilei), 1939, revised 1947 and 1956. Galileo and his retraction before the Inquisition. The play examines the social responsibility of the scientist. Brecht revised the play substantially after Hiroshima.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui), 1941, premiered 1958. A gangster parable of Hitler's rise. Set in 1930s Chicago vegetable trade. The play insists that Hitler's rise was resistible: nothing about it was inevitable.

Brecht's collaborators

Brecht worked closely with composers (Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau), designers (Caspar Neher), and actors (Helene Weigel, his wife). The Berlin Ensemble (1949) was the laboratory in which the late Brecht plays were staged.

Influence and legacy

Brechtian epic theatre has been one of the most influential traditions in twentieth and twenty-first century theatre. Influence has shown up in:

• The Living Theatre and the Open Theatre in the United States (1960s). Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre adopted Brechtian techniques.
• Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop (1953 to 1979, UK). Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963) uses Brechtian devices to dramatise the First World War.
• Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (Brazil, from 1971). Boal's Forum Theatre techniques develop from Brecht.
• Caryl Churchill (born 1938, UK). Her plays from Cloud Nine (1979) to A Number (2002) are Brechtian in structure.
• Tony Kushner (born 1956, US). Angels in America (1991) deploys Brechtian devices in a US political context.
• Australian political theatre. Melbourne Workers Theatre (1987 to 2012), Patricia Cornelius's work, and Bell Shakespeare's various Brechtian productions.

How Brecht is examined

Section II essays on Brecht typically ask candidates to analyse the conventions of epic theatre, discuss specific plays, or evaluate Brecht's contribution to political theatre. Strong essays cite Brechtian terminology precisely (verfremdung, gestus, epic theatre), name specific plays and scenes, and engage with the political aims, not only the formal techniques.