Bertolt Brecht

and Epic Theatre

A Level Theatre Studies -
Component 1 Live Theatre;
Component 3
Specification overview:

https://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/drama/a-level/drama-and-theatre-7262/spec
ification-at-a-glance
Component 3 structure:
Extract 1, Advent Term: Brecht and Epic Theatre - The Caucasian Chalk Circle,
Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, Life of Galileo, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,
The Threepenny Opera

Extract 2, Lent Term: Katie Mitchell - The Effect by Lucy Prebble or Colder than
Here by Laura Wade

Extract 3, Trinity Term: Frantic Assembly - The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin
McCraney or Fences by August Wilson

Interspersed: Live Theatre essays; Reflective Report; Assessments

Reflective Report
Bertolt Brecht (1898 - 1956)
Bertolt Brecht (1898 - 1956)
- German Theatre director, poet & playwright
- Epic Theatre (Dialectical Theatre)
- In contrast to naturalistic performance, Brecht
shifts towards drama that delivers a social and
political message, and rejects the suspension of
disbelief.
- Brecht’s primary aim: to create a political theatre
that communicates with, and educates, its
audience.
- Makes theatre for performance in unconventional
spaces, for unconventional audiences.
Bertolt Brecht (1898 - 1956)
- Naturalism - an audience loses themselves in plot
and character, watching people live their lives as
though unobserved.
- Epic Theatre - an audience leaves the theatre
having been moved to change the social and
political make-up of society, to redress injustice
and demand a freer, more egalitarian life for all.
- Brecht wanted: ‘to develop the means of
entertainment into an object of instruction, and to
change certain institutions from places of
amusement into organs of public communication’
(The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht; Willet, J)
Bertolt Brecht (1898 - 1956)
- For Brecht the traditional, or dramatic theatre, was a
place where the audience were absorbed into a
comforting illusion which played on their emotions
and left them drained, but with a sense of
satisfaction which predisposed them to accept the
world as they found it. Brecht was looking for a
theatre that would help to change the world.
(Rorrison, H)
- How can the theatre be entertaining and at the same
time instructive? How can it be taken out of the traffic in
intellectual drugs and transformed from a place of
illusion to a place of insight? (Brecht, 1939: On
Experimental Theatre)
Verfremdungseffekt or the V-Effekt

alienation/estrangement/distancing

"playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying
itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and
utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as
hitherto, in the audience's subconscious"

(Brecht, 1936: Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting)

Brechtian techniques - towards an Epic Theatre
Gestus Rewind
Narration - (the narrator and narrative form) Alternate points of view
Dialogue Slow motion
Third person Still image
Historicisation Multi-roling
Token costumes and props Breaking the fourth wall
Telling and re-telling Archetype
Impersonate Masks
- A plasterer, 24, from Essex running late for a flight to Malaga
for a boys’ holiday with six old school .
- A top heart surgeon, 59, on his way to an international
conference of heart specialists in Berlin where he will be the
keynote speaker on some ground-breaking research he has
recently completed.
- A single mother, 19, on benefits with her two-year old
daughter, going to visit her sick mother in Scotland.
- An Italian housewife, 48, visiting the grave of her mother in
France. She has two children, both at university, and a
husband who works in a merchant bank in the city.
- A supply teacher, 29 travelling to Sydney, Australia, in search of
more money and a better job.
 Film Influences
Chaplin’s The Gold Rush:

https://learning.alleyns.org.uk/film-studies/year-12-film-studies/01-film-history-section-a/a-the-silent-film-era-1915-
1929

Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, The Odessa Steps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMWMq4AEyjU&t=28s
Bertolt Brecht (1898 - 1956)
- Brecht is deeply affected by the social, political,
cultural and economic events that surround him.

- Research the following topics: Communism;

Marx; Egalitarian Society; Fascism; The rise of
Hitler.

- Consider: note a timeline of significant events

that occur during Brecht’s lifetime.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI&t=66
6s