Bertolt Brecht was born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht on the 10 February 1898 in Augsburg Germany.  During his 58 years of life, Brecht worked as a playwright, theatre director, teacher and poet and developed his world renowned theatrical theories.

Brecht saw theatre as having a clearly didactic purpose; Art for Arts sake was not enough it should be used as a vehicle to generate awareness of the society presented, therefore leading the audience to question and thus bring about social change.  Brecht felt that in order to enable the audience to question, and moreover make judgements on the societies and world views presented on stage, they had to maintain awareness.  At no point should the audience be allowed to slip into what he described as a hypnotic state that over empathy with the characters or situation could produce.  He saw the hypnotic state, that he believed was induced by the theatre of Naturalism, as tantamount to acceptance; by this he meant that when watching a Naturalist performance, the audience were swept along with the action, accepting the consequences of said action as absolute, in other words inevitable.  What Brecht wished to highlight through his work was that no consequence was inevitable, but rather that a number of paths could have been taken, but because of the social situation the outcome was achieved.  Because society is formed by man, the outcomes displayed on stage were a consequence of mans actions and choices and could therefore be open to judgement by the audience and thus changed.  Brecht wanted his audience to take lessons from the stage action about apply those lessons to the society in which they lived, thus bringing about social change.

However, in order to make these judgements, Brecht believed that the audience had to remain rational and objective, if they became emotionally involved or lost within the action they could not make the objective decisions needed to bring about the social change that he so craved.  In order to ensure the audience questioned the action on stage, Brecht developed a non-realist, presentational style of theatre that formed the groundwork for his work.

The Theatre Techniques of Bertolt Brecht

Epic Theatre

Brecht’s theatre is concerned with establishing the cause and effect of events, and presenting these to the audience in a way which allows them to be analytical; to achieve this result Brecht developed the use of Epic theatre.  Epic theatre involved the telling of the narrative in a non-linear way, in other words “separate story events are recounted outside of the traditional time sequences that we find in poetic forms… (i.e. outside of) sequential chronological time” (Drama and Theatre Studies at As/A Level. Neelands, J. & Dobson, W.).  The effect of separating the plays action into “separate story events” or episodes was the breaking up of the through line of action which Brecht believed led to the apathetic, hypnotic state within the audience that he desperately wished to avoid and challenge.

In Epic theatre each episode was a self-contained and free standing scene that took place in one location and dealt with a single event.  Because these events were presented in a non-linear time frame, the emphasis for formulating the connections between the episodes and drawing conclusions on the action was therefore placed back upon the audience. 

This emphasis forced the audience out of their apathetic state and into a thinking and questioning body, capable of making judgement upon the action.  By revealing the causes of the action and events, and by cutting the action up into separate segments or episodes, Brecht’s Epic theatre enabled the audience to make the connections between the cause and the outcome, and with this ability came the inevitable proposition “man’s fate is himself” and therefore “man’s fate is changeable” (Brecht quoted in Systems of Rehearsal: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook. Mitter, Shomit.  Page 44); once the audience were able to make these connections and accept this proposition within the plays reality, they could apply the same judgement and thinking processes to the society in which they lived, and that Brecht hoped would lead to the social change he craved.

Essential to establishing the structure of Epic theatre, is the need to keep the plays episodes separate from each other, and the changes between them clearly distinguishable.  There should be no natural or imperceptible shifts between the action of one episode to the next, but clear and definitive shifts; for as Shomit Mitter explains “The individual episodes have to be knotted together in such a way that the knots are easily noticed.  The episodes must not succeed each another indistinguishably, but must give us a chance to interpose our judgement” (Systems of Rehearsal: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook.  Mitter, Shomit.), and in order for the audience to impose its judgement upon the action, they must remain emotionally detached and capable of objective observation of the action and characters.   In order to achieve the audiences emotional detachment with the play, Brecht creates a non-illusionist theatre, which he achieves this through his style of presentation, this is achieved through the following methods:

1. Firstly, Brecht writes universal characters based on social types rather than psychological.  Mother Courage is a prime example of Brecht’s use of psychological types: she represents not an individual woman but all war time working class mothers.  Brecht is concerned with “what a character does, and through their actions we come to understand history and the class system” (Drama and Theatre Studies at As/A Level. Neelands, J. & Dobson, W.)
2. Brecht always wanted to heighten the fact that the audience were watching a theatrical performance and not a genuine representation; therefore whenever he used stage lighting he used bright, white lights, irrespective of the mood or location; and insisted that the stage lights were always visible to the audience. 
3. The labelling or captioning of scenes was a major factor in the representation of Brecht’s plays.  He did not want the audience to get immersed in the action, but wanted them to concentrate on why and how the events were happening.  To avoid the audience emersion in events, he often labelled scenes, or provided summaries of the action that was about to unfold and with this knowledge, the audience’s attention was left free to question the events. 

The Verfrumdungseffekt

The verfrumdungseffekt is central to creating Brecht’s critically analytical audience, capable of bringing about social change.  The literal translation of the term is the strange-making effect, and refers to the estrangement or de-familiarisation of the events on stage.  The technique is used to “discourage the audience from identifying with character and so losing detachment, the action must continually be made strange, alien, remote and separate” , and the following are some of the methods used to create the Verfrumdungseffekt.

Implicit in the Verfrumdungseffekt is the actor’s representation of character on stage; the technique requires that the performer does not become fully immersed in the role, but plays both the actor and the character.  Because the actor is playing outside the character they are capable of making judgement and commentary on the character that he/she is playing.   Brecht gives the example of the re-telling of a car accident; the story teller is capable of telling the story, maybe even impersonating those involved, but it is still clear when he is playing the character, when he is telling the story himself, and when he is making critical judgement on the situation.  The audience never forgets that they are watching a re-telling of the accident, and therefore can stay emotionally detached. 

Brecht often uses song or music to break up the continuity of action, thus preventing the audience from becoming hypnotically involved in the performance.  Unlike in modern musicals songs are not used as a means of heightening the emotional content of the scene but rather serve as commentaries upon the action; and together with the role of the storyteller/narrator, they can serve to “comment on the action, alert us to important details we should be paying attention to, and offer a differ viewpoint from those that characters hold.  Alternatively, he or she can pose questions for us to consider” (Drama and Theatre Studies at As/A Level. Neelands, J. & Dobson, W.).  Through the use of music, song and storyteller, Brecht uses the Verfrumdungseffekt to provide a juxtaposition to the action and characters through which the audience can perceive the events from an alternative perspective and is encouraged to continually question the action and characters on stage.

The use of signs or placards within the performance highlighted certain actions in the episode or posed questions to the audience, which again by presenting information to the audience in a ‘strange or surprising manner’ encouraging the audience to look at the episode in a new or an unusual way.