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Brecht Through Practice

Brecht's gift to modern theatre is to allow it a social usefulness; he liberates theatre from slavish imitations of life and allows different styles of acting to co-exist: naturalism gives way to clear outlines, comic exaggeration and a collage approach to production, to put over a particular message.

The background from which Brecht's style emerged is important to understanding why Brecht comes up with the theories he does, but at the end of the day it is what his theatre proposes as an acting style that is our concern. Whatever the means by which he arrived at his theories, there is a recognisable style when these theories are put together into one body, called 'epic theatre' and this style is as valid and useful today as it ever was.

The epic style can be adapted to any form of theatre that puts a social or political message before the exploration of character. Once character is less important than message and the intricacies of human motive less intriguing than storytelling and the exploration of situation, you have Brechtian theatre.

Every effort has been made to order the theories into a logical framework so that they can be easily followed and understood by students and to translate them into purely practical terms so that each theory can be tested through practice. Students may thus pick up the points made and turn them easily into essays backed up with practical knowledge.

The first section of Brecht Through Practice explores Brecht's theories in their final state, always recognising that, unlike Stanislavski, Brecht does not have a clear System to follow which takes an actor on a path from A to B. The second section places the historical context and influences on his work and explores Brecht's theories through some of his plays.


Contents:

General Introduction; First Lessons;

Part One: Exploring the Theories:

  1. Clarity - Putting Over a Message - Gest
  2. Exaggeration & Realism
  3. Demonstration & Emotion
  4. Narrative Techniques
  5. The Uses of Humour
  6. Not... But, The Identification of Choice
  7. Verfremdungseffekt - Making Strange;
  8. The Use of Masks
  9. Teamwork
  10. Using the Theories - A Final Group Project

Part Two: Approaches to text:

  1. Brecht the Playwright
  2. Teaching & Learning
  3. Work on 'He Who Says Yes'
  4. Work on 'The Measures Taken'
  5. Transition - 'A note on The Mother'
  6. Work on 'The Caucasian Chalk Circle'
  7. Work on 'Mother Courage'

Conclusion - Culinary & Epic Theatre


Sample Pages from Brecht Through Practice:

Clarity - Putting over a Message - Gest

Brecht's principal concern is to put over a message in such a way that an audience can be in no doubt as to the intentions of the performance. That is the reason he and his actors spent so much time poring over photographs of the plays in rehearsal - each moment of the play was photographed - checking that the still moment captured on film delivered clearly what was supposed to be happening on stage. Was it clear that so-and-so was about to tell a lie? Would the audience be able to tell that the judge was in the pay of the gangsters and that the defendant had been beaten? Just by looking at the stage picture? The language of gesture and facial expression is clearly very important then to the Brechtian technique.


Practical Work

1. The class should pair up and then face their partners with the furthest distance possible between them, e.g. the extreme ends of the hall or studio. Thus you have the whole group divided into half with one half facing the other.
Without telling their partners, each individual thinks of a well- known nursery rhyme or the words of a song with which they are familiar. Then, on a signal from the teacher, everyone speaking at once tries to communicate their rhyme to their partner; so everyone is talking and listening at the same time. The result will be pandemonium!
Stop it very quickly, after only a few seconds. Ask them how many understood what their partner was saying. Very few will, unless you have a tiny group. Then, talking strictly, tell them it is life and death that they communicate their 'message' to their partners, but give them no clues as to how to do this. They must stay where they are and they are still both communicating and listening.
What should happen, and usually does, is that more and more individuals start to use gesture and pantomime their rhymes.
Let it run for a little longer, but not long enough for people to reach the end of their rhymes, because that will leave some voices exposed. Now ask how many understood their partners. Far more will, if not the whole group.
Emphasise the importance of gesture and body language to communicate a message.

2. Still in pairs, ask the students to find three different body positions and facial expressions to communicate the following: love; respect; disbelief; regret; admiration; intimidation. In each case one partner will have to be the one 'doing' and the other one will be 'receiving' or reacting. Test these out by using the rest of the class as an audience, perhaps not having known the stimulus.

Now develop this by making a sequence of the three 'stills', linked together with brief narration, which one of the pair, A or B, supplies.
e.g. taking 'love', first 'still' shows A's admiring gaze on B, who is dancing. Narration = 'Andy first saw Beth at the party. He had never seen anyone so attractive before. He determined to talk to her.' Second 'still', A asking B for a date...etc.

Brecht believes that social situations change the way people behave, unlike Stanislavski, who showed through his System that people are the same the world over, sharing the same emotions in whatever period of history they may be born. Thus Oedipus, Othello, and Dr Stockmann, though they come from entirely different periods of time and social and cultural backgrounds, are basically the same. Their pain is the eternal pain of human suffering.

Brecht was anxious to disprove this. He believed that human beings are formed by their society and culture and their behaviour is appropriate to their time; in consequence, he wanted to create theatre that was appropriate to 'the modern age' and characters that react in a twentieth century way: "theatre for the scientific age," and since the scientific age is a rational one, character, like everything else should be put under the microscope.

3. With the students in small groups, each group is given a situation. They are to discuss the different responses to their situation and then compile three short scenes which demonstrate three different responses, or, if they are able, all three responses could take place in the same scene from three different characters.

Suitable situations:

Discuss afterwards the difference it makes when characters are responding directly to situations. Would it make a difference if the characters had been built up from the inside, Stanislavski fashion? Does a meek man always respond meekly? Or might he discover a lion inside him if his family was threatened? At what point does the pacifist become ready to kill?

There is much food for debate here with your groups and I believe it is fruitful, because there will be many who are reluctant to let go of their Stanislavskian background [ or at least the kind of 'realism' offered by some of their favourite soaps]. Many students will prefer not to challenge the concept that characters behave consistently and that they can be given a 'through-line' from birth to death.

But are real life people consistent? Of course they are not. People contradict themselves the whole time, with perfect sincerity. People in literature, however, often are consistent - they are made so by their authors - and that is why Stanislavski's System can work for so many plays of a certain naturalistic type, because the truth about life he is aiming to show on stage is "artistic truth", i.e. life in a tidied up form.

I am certainly not suggesting that you should undermine such work as you have done on Stanislavski, but it should be stressed that naturalism works for plays of a certain type and there are many other genres of play around. All this above work is necessary to establish the different standpoints of Stanislavski and Brecht and to open the students' minds to other forms of theatre than naturalism. Brecht's sprawling choice of theatrical expression, his 'epic theatre', is ideally formed to show characters over a wide span of years in a number of situations, responding directly to these situations, as their reason or the needs of the moment dictate. His form of theatre is therefore in many ways more 'realistic' than Stanislavski's tidy naturalism.

Working in this way, with situation rather than character as the basis for action, Brecht needed a different theatre language than that established by naturalism. So far we have explored the need for clarity and the establishment of situation, without taking this further into establishing a message for the audience. This is of course what gives Brechtian theatre its particular slant. A Brechtian play must have an 'attitude' and that attitude will be political in the broadest sense of the word. This 'attitude' demands a group of actors who are consciously projecting the message by means of their characters and their staging. Throughout the entire performance, the actors must not lose sight of their true objective, whether it is to provoke debate or to educate the audience and so they must never become immersed in their characters or this will muddle the intention. Further, they must know at every moment of the play what attitude that scene or moment of the play is putting over. Hence we have the Brechtian word 'gest' or 'gestus'; the two mean the same and are interchangeable.

'Gest' is gesture plus attitude. Brecht defines it in this way: a group of soldiers marching across the stage is merely 'gesture'; the soldiers are not conveying anything to the audience other than that they are soldiers. Put a number of dead bodies on the stage and have the soldiers marching over them and you have 'gest'. The picture shown to the audience is that the soldiers are uncaring, deadened to war and the results of it, so that is conveying an 'attitude.' "Gest' is the main area that students seem to find difficult to grasp. It is, of course, much easier to do that to describe. The following exercise is particularly helpful in identifying the difference between gesture and gest.

4. The students all move around the room [I tend to use my familiar grid exercise for this, because it sharpens their attention and has them moving in a more purposeful manner]. The floor is divided up with imaginary lines like graph paper. Individuals may only move along the lines, in silence, at a crisp pace, making only sharp turns, not stopping, not slowing down, taking evasive action if someone is coming towards them on a collision course; bumping is not allowed.

Having established the rhythmic way of moving, they will be concentrated and quickly warmed up. Then tell them that when you clap your hands they partner up with the person nearest to them. Without talking, they should make instant statues of the following. Between each statue they should move back to the grid so that the next statue is done with someone else as partner.

On the last one, 'rich and poor', get them to look around at each other. I would almost guarantee they will have come up with nearly identical poses: the rich person looking snootily in the air and avoiding contact with the poor person, who is down in a begging position, looking pitiful.

Find out if they can see the difference between a statue for, say, summer and winter, and this one. It is the difference between gesture and gest. Unconsciously, each one of them is showing an opinion, an attitude: the rich are snobby and uncaring, the poor are needy and to be sympathised with. Their poses have been 'gests'. Of course, then it needs explaining that what a Brechtian actor is doing is making gests consciously. A true gest cannot really be unplanned, unconscious. But though they have been 'tricked' into doing a gest, you will find they remember it and it makes a good example.

5. Divide the class into groups. Explain that gest covers individual body language and facial expression [also voice tone when necessary] but it is also a term to describe the whole stage picture. Gest is about attitude, but it is also about clarity. The attitude of the actors and the play must be put over as clearly as possible, whether there is one actor alone on the stage or a huge number. Gest is being used all the time.

Ask the groups to make two contrasting gestic tableaux of the following:

If gest is the whole stage picture, discuss what other things could be added to, say, the first two on war, to help communicate the gest? Costume additions, props, is what you want as the answer, for instance shiny uniforms and medals for the first picture; rags and tatters, bloody bandages, etc. for the second one.

6. Return to the earlier exercise on situation rather than character. Here the students presented three possible responses to a given situation. Now ask them to choose an attitude that they as a group wish the audience to understand. Perhaps that attitude may be, using the first scenario as an example, that it is better to keep your head low in that bomb crater, keeping your options open. What adjustments would be needed to the characters and their different responses to make your attitude to them clear? Perhaps the hero becomes stupid, exaggeratedly gung-ho and not bright enough to see that death is not necessarily glorious. The man keeping his head down may become rational, thinking things through and sharing his thoughts with the audience in a humorous fashion, because he wants - as do the rest of the cast - the audience to be on his side and to see his solutions as the best option in a difficult situation. Get the students to repeat their final presentation, making clear the attitude they have to the three responses.

It is necessary to start with gest, because, as you will quickly find, it is something that the actor is using all the time. A Brechtian actor cannot perform without deciding on the attitude he is taking to the piece and the character. In any performance this will be a group decision; each actor will be absolutely clear as to the viewpoint the whole scene is conveying and the way he must interpret his character in consequence, in order to contribute correctly to the whole piece.

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