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TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > Theatre Studies > Brecht Notes
Key points
- Style of production
- Dramatic intentions of the production for the audience-political/didactic/entertaining
- Choice of staging form
- Shape and size of the performance stage
- Positioning of the audience in relation to the acting area
- Actor/audience relationship-alienation
- Epic structure
- Use of placards/slides/film
- Actors demonstrating their roles/characters defined by function
- Verfrumdungsteffekt
- Costume/setting
- Political subject matter
The Epic Play
- Follows a story familiar to the audience-often in the form of a fable or showing historical events
- Makes the story unsensational
- Strips away the dramatic disguise that theatre often uses
- Episodic-series of a lone standing loosely connected scenes
- Uses musical interludes, captions and gestures to end scenes
- The interludes allow the audience to reflect critically on what they have just scene. They also prevented feelings of empathy or the illusion of reality
- Characters represent an individual who represents all humankind. Helps break the empathy that one might feel for a character.
The Epic Actor
- Serve as narrators and demonstrators
- They retell events and in doing so demonstrate actions and events that assist in the audiences understanding the situation
- Used theatrical device of gestus-a position or gesture taken up to encapsulate the feelings of a character at one time.
- Ensemble acting
The Epic Stage
- Brecht saw the stage as a place for discussion
- It provides the audience with questions, possible solutions and encourages them to think, determine and act.
- Lighting, music, scenery, costume changes, acting style, projections etc were all in full view of the audience
- Change of scale of properties and use them out of context. Challenges the audience and reminds them it is manufactured and an illusion.
The Alienation Effect
- Purpose is to put the audience in a situation where they can reflect critically in a social context
Comments
This essay is aimed at AQA A Level theatre studies (synoptic paper)
Originally written by happydinosaur on TSR Forums.
