Style exploration 1: Epic Theatre and Expressionism

Why explore epic theatre?

You will be familiar with at least two examples of modern Epic theatre through studying
and watching ʻOh What a Lovely War!ʼ and ʻThe Good Person of Szechuan.ʼ

Epic theatre offers you an opportunity to make a piece of theatre that provokes thought in
the audience.

Epic theatre should be a vibrant, physical and creative form of work that challenges you to
think deeply about what you do.

Background:

The term ʻEpicʼ was made relevant to modern theatre by Bertolt Brecht, however, it refers
to a form of art that dates back to the origins of formal theatre. The term ʻepicʼ referred ori-
ginally to the writing of Homer, whose poetry featured a number of conventions that other
writers began to utilise, thus creating a specific style or genre. These included

• Vast settings (distance travelled in terms of both time and/or space) and journeys
through them/
• Reference to other stories within the narrative (often mythical heroes)
• Begins with a statement of theme, question or outline of the situation
• Narrative begins ʻin medias resʼ (meaning ʻin the middleʼ) and character, settings and re-
lationships established through flashback and expository dialogue retelling past events.
(therefore chronology is disrupted and not smooth)
• The Epic poem often concerned human morality and was written in such a way that it
could be placed within a universal context.

Brecht believed this ʻEpicʼ art form stood in opposition to the ʻDramaticʼ - he believed it was
a form of storytelling that encouraged thought as opposed to the Aristotelian concept of
catharsis or emotional reaction. He liked the fact that it concerned morality and posed
questions of the audience and he certainly used some of the conventions above in his own
writing.

Development of the modern Epic Theatre

It would be ridiculous to credit Brecht alone with the style of Epic theatre as many people
contributed to the development of the style. We can credit Brecht as the man who coins
the name and writes about it, but as you will see, the seeds of much of Brechtʼs theory
were being sown by others, many years ealier.

Epic Theatre owes a huge debt to EXPRESSIONISM, a theatrical and artistic movement
which rejects impressionismʼs attempt to capture external reality and instead tries to “ex-
press private experience, inner idea of vision and rejects the realistic1”

Expressionism is linked strongly to German theatre and was in some ways an attempt to
revolt against the rigid lines of society. It was a youthful rebellion against the established
values and status quo. Interestingly before developing his own distinctive Epic style,
Brechtʼs early plays were much simpler rebellious, more Expressionistic affairs.

Some of the key features of Expressionism were:

- Often a dreamlike and vividly nightmarish atmosphere, shadowy unrealistic lighting,

strange use of pause and silence
- Settings heavily simplified and created from distorted shapes and vivid, striking colours
- Plots disjointed and told in episodes as a series of statements. Completely rejects the
ʻwell made play ideaʼ

1 J.L Stynan - Modern Drama in Theory and Practice 3 - Expressionism and Epic Theatre 1996
 Style exploration 1: Epic Theatre and Expressionism

- Characters lost individuality and often only referred to stereotypically or as caricatures.

For example as “The father,” “the mother,” “The Workman” etc. Writers used these charac-
ter to represent social groups, not specific individuals and directors reintroduced the mask
to theatre at this point. The characters could appear grotesque as a result of their lack of
individuality
- Dialogue was poetic and often ignores the rules of conversation
- Acting was often described as ʻbroad and mechanicalʼ ʻas if showing the behaviour of a
puppetʼ which was well suited to creating comedy.

Some of the above is obviously a huge influence on Brecht. This quote below from Paul
Kornfield, in 1913 (when Brecht was just 15) is an interesting forerunner of some of his
ideas.

“Let him dare to stretch his arms out wide... to speak as he has never spoken in his life...
in short, let him not be ashamed of the fact that he is acting. Let him not deny theatre or try
to feign reality”2

Key influences on the development of modern Epic and Expressionistic Theatre

1) George Buchner (1813-37)

Buchner died nearly one hundred years before Brecht began to create his own master-
pieces, and experienced little or no success as a playwright during his life or immediately
after his death. Why is he so important? - Because he was so far ahead of his time, being
a playwright who create some work that even today appears modern and challenging.
(You can read Buchnerʼs work on the internet as it is old enough to be out of copywrite.)

The play ʻDantonʼs Deathʼ is significant as it is dialectical (presents a debate) as the two
main characters are both virtuous and with vice. It is not clear who the audience should
side with and ends ambiguosly (isnʼt neatly tied up into a judgement). It consists of a rapid
sequence of scenes and includes course, vulgar ballads that punctuate the action.

His play is Leonce and Lena is interesting as it is an allegorical fairy tale about two op-
posing characters, a pessimistic prince and an optimistic princess. It takes a universal
philosophical question about how we should approach live and transfers this to fantastical
setting. This play is the least performed of his works

His final play was truly extraordinary, especially in the context of its time. Woyzeck has an
open structure and presents a highly complex dialectical problem for an audience. It con-
sists of a number of episodes from the life of a soldier who kills his wife, but invites the
audience to question whether the society Woyzeck lives in is partly or totally to blame. It
also includes a whole host of clever ideas designed to make an audience think including
ʻparataxisʼ (the juxtaposition of opposing elements, without apparant link,) songs and stor-
ies seemingly unrelated to the central narrative as well as performing animals and a dark
wicked humour and sense of absurdity. What makes the play especially intriguing is that
no-one knows the correct order of the scenes as Woyzeck didnʼt indicate this in his manu-
scripts and died very young.

2 Kornfeld, P - ʻEpilogue to the Actorʼ - (The Seduction 1913)

 Style exploration 1: Epic Theatre and Expressionism

2) Frank Wedekind
A big influence on Brecht, Wedekind had a reputation for breaking taboos and a key fea-
ture of his writing was sex, which he used to attack the “shams of bourgious morality.” He,
like Brecht also glamourised and made heroes of figures like gangsters, criminals and
prostitutes. Not surprisingly for one so challenging, his work was especially popular with a
young audience. He used many of Buchnerʼs techniques to avoid realism and to control
the tone of his plays. (had he not employed ʻalienationʼ perhaps his work could have been
seen as simple erotic indulgence, rather than having a point to make.)

He was particularly noted as a playwright for:

- symbolic names (e.g. teachers called ʻThickstickʼ and Bonebreakerʼ)
- a desire to shock and scandalize (to challenge the commonly held and hypocritical val-
ues)
- Characters who are contradictary (e.g. ʻLuluʼ from ʻEarth Spiritʼ who are both murderous
and sympathetic)
- Characters who ʻtalk past, rather than at one anotherʼ3
- dialogue ʻdrenched in icy humourʼ4

As a director and actor he was noted for:

- ʻa burlesqueʼ acting style

- valuing the playful above the realistic
- mixing the natural with the bizarre
- Brecht described him as ʻa powerful actor, full of suppressed energyʼ

3) Surrealism and ʻA Dream Playʼ

The development of the style is partly influenced by the work of playwrights like August
Strinberg who developed a form of drama based on the dream world. Although Strindberg
also wrote some relatively realistic plays he also produced a bizzare work called ʻA Dream
Playʼ which has proved a huge challenge for directors for the last century. It used ʻpoly-
phonicʼ dialogue - Strindbergs own term for a sort of choral form of speaking where char-
acters spoke as a group, one individual picking up the thoughts of another, almost like a
telepathic being. The distorted dream world he presented was a big influence on the ex-
pressionists and though Brecht and later Epic writers shared very different aims than
Strindberg, the idea of a deformed version of reality or warped mirror on the world is a key
to understanding this style.
3 Mueller, C ʻThe Lulu Playsʼ 1967
4 J.L Stynan - Modern Drama in Theory and Practice 3 - Expressionism and Epic Theatre 1996
 Style exploration 1: Epic Theatre and Expressionism

Development and influence of Expressionism

Expressionismʼs influence spread through the world touching a huge range of playwrights
and directors including

- Max Reinhardt (A German director of huge reputation)

- Sean OʼCasey (Irish Dramatist who was a big fan of German expressionism who fought
against the trend for realistic drama “the rage for real life has taken all the life out of the
drama. If everything on stage is to be a fake imitation, where is the chance for the imagin-
ative artist?”)
- Vsevolod Meyerhold (Soviet Russian, whom is credited with the popularisation of the
term ʻstyleizationʼ and who took over Stanislavskiʼs work and introduced more physical act-
ing, rejecting many of naturalisms key ideas, choosing to acknowledge the audience and
developing ideas like ʻpre actingʼ a technique not unlike Brechtʼs own not...but, where the
actor had to physically show the thoughts of a character before settling on the lines the
character said)
- Arthur Miller (American playwright) Often considered naturalistic and treated as such by
directors and teachers alike, Miller in fact regarded his greatest play ʻDeath of a Salesmanʼ
to have tremendous expressionistic potential, and intended it to show, not a slice of realist-
ic life, but the inside of Willy Lomanʼs mind with fragments of thought and episodes show-
ing his “confusion”

Expressionism as a genre in itʼs own right is considered by many to be dead, but itʼs leg-
acy is a range of techniques and stylistic devices that are as much a part of the modern
playwright or directors toolkit as those of naturalism or any other style.

Development of a new Epic Theatre. - Erwin Piscator

Erwin Piscator was a huge influence on and even worked with Bertolt Brecht for a number
of years developing an intensely political style of drama that had a massive influence on
what he and Brecht termed Episches Theatrer (Epic Theatre). Piscator was motivated by
similar events as Brecht, his horror at the slaughter of the First Word War and his aware-
ness of the communist revolution in Russia.

Piscatorʼs working methods were influenced by much of the expressionist movement, but
he introduces the explicitly political aspect that differentiates this form of Drama from its
stylistic predecessor. He regards the Epic Stage as a ʻplay machineʼ or ʻarena for battling
ideasʼ5 Key aspects of his style include:

- Simplistic class based characters for characters

- Sometimes actors representing real life figures would comment on the action
- Use of narrative devices like a newsreader or similar to interupt action
- Some performances were ʻrevueʼ style, consisting of song and dance, sketches, films,
slide shows with an accompanying programme explaining the theme
- Famous for using ʻmixed mediaʼ applying films, still photographs, newsreels to support,
expand upon and comment on the action on stage. This mixed media performance intro-
duced a new level of symbolic scale to the audience - imagine seeing an actor projected
as a giant against the back wall of a theatre. One performance even included satirical car-
toon sketches as characters.
- Applied signs and placards (like in early films) with summaries of action and comments -
a good example was using imagery of corpses on a battlefield to provide a counterpoint to
a serious discussion on military stratagy6
- Experimented with lighting and sound, even turning the lights to shine on the audience
and creating a glass stage that could be underlit for effects.
- Used music to great effect to point to meaning and shape the audience reaction

5 Piscator, E ʻThe Political Theatre, A History 1914-1929ʼ 1978

6 Mitter, S and Shevtsova, M - Fifty Key Theatre Directors 2005
 Style exploration 1: Epic Theatre and Expressionism

- Used machinery with great imagination to create effects - for example, a key feature of
his most successful play ʻThe Good Soldier Schweikʼ was a treadmill that helped tell the
farcical and comically tragic tale of a manic and unfortunate journey.

There is considerably more useful detail on Piscator on Moodle and he is a figure you
should look to for influence if you are working on Epic Theatre.

Development of a new Epic Theatre - Bertolt Brecht

As this booklet has shown, it is obvious that Brecht was not alone in developing what is of-
ten considered as ʻhisʼ form of theatre. In many ways, what makes Brecht so succesful is
his ability to assimilate (bring together) ideas from so many different people and apply
them to his own work.

Beyond Brecht: Epic theatre

The key influence of Brecht and his promotion of the Epic ideals can be described as
teaching “the playwright to turn away from his subjective self and to transmute his expres-
sionistic fervour to a calculated social criticism.” This writer is pointing to a number of play-
wrights who adopted his ideas and created drama that forced their audiences to consider
their world critically, as opposed to just musing on their emotions. These included Max
Frisch, author of the wonderful and macabre tail of ʻThe Fire Raisersʼ in which a business-
man allows some dangerous and obviously violent terrorists refuge in his house. This text
is absurdly amusing but darkly symbolic of the way that the German people thought they
could tame the wild ideas of Hitler and refused to face the situation in front of them.

Friedrich Durrenmatt also provides wonderfully absurd and challenging texts which offer
tremendous questions for an audience. ʻThe Visitʼ is his best known work offering a truly
strange scenario, a former prostitute returns to her poverty stricken old home town, ac-
companied by a train of dwarves to demand the death of her former lover in exchange for
a share of her now enormous wealth. The clear moral about the effect of money on human
behavior is presented in a hugely creative way and the play could never be presented in a
realistic way.

British Epic Theatre

Legendary director Peter Brook was one of the first British directors to make a genuine at-
tempt to understand Brecht and apply his ideas. He talks at length about his views on
Brecht (available on Moodle) in his writings.

Many British writers have used some of the techniques of Epic theatre but few have truly
dedicated themselves to this form.

Joan Littlewoodʼs ʻTheatre Workshopʼ was of course heavily influenced by Brecht and this
is a fertile area for exploration by the student of Eic Theatre

John Arden is a British playwright who saw the Berliner Ensembleʼs production of Mother
Courage and his play ʻSerjeant Musgraveʼs Danceʼ is a good example of a dialectical play,
shot through with direct address, poetic speech and song.

Edward Bondʼs later works are intensely influenced by Brecht

David Hare has used the epic structure for some of his work, though by no means all of it.
Writers like Caryl Churchill have also utilised epic ideas and the work of companies like
Complicite in some way utilise an epic form at time.

However, Brecht, though failing in his goal of achieving a peaceful communist uprising, did
achieve such success as to see his ideas become a central part of the way we think of
theatre in the 21st century, so much so that rarely is the term ʻepicʼ used to describe con-
temporay theatre, even though many of its values are a key part of a modern style.