Revision:Brecht Notes

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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 or Verfremdungseffekt

Verfremdungseffekt (Or V-Effekt) - Translates close to... 'making strange'.

• Put simply: The purpose is to put the audience in a situation where they can reflect critically in a social context.

The distancing effect is achieved by the way the "artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him. The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place.

The use of direct audience-address is one way of disrupting stage illusion and generating the distancing effect. In performance, as the performer "observes himself", his or her objective is "to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work."

Whether Brecht intended the distancing effect to refer to the audience or to the actor or to both audience and actor is still controversial among teachers and scholars of "Epic Acting" and Brechtian theatre.

By disclosing and making obvious the manipulative contrivances and "fictive" qualities of the medium, the viewer is alienated from any passive acceptance and enjoyment of the film as mere "entertainment." Instead, the viewer is forced into a critical, analytical frame of mind that serves to disabuse him or her of the notion that what he or she is watching is necessarily an inviolable, self-contained narrative. This effect of making the familiar strange serves a didactic function insofar as it teaches the viewer not to take the style and content for granted, since the medium itself is highly constructed and contingent upon many cultural and economic conditions.

Comments

This essay is aimed at AQA A Level theatre studies (synoptic paper)

Originally written by happydinosaur on TSR Forums.