Acting Styles: Bertolt Brecht

Background 

Bertolt Brecht was born in Germany, 1898. In his early 30's he worked as a medic in WW1, appalled by war, he decided to move to Berlin to work in theatre. However, when the Nazis came into power, he fled the country, resulting in his citizenship being removed.

After setting up in the USA, he gained citizenship in 1941. He was a strong communist and was not afraid of expressing his views, hence, was a target of the House of Unamerican Activities, who were very much anti communist.

In 1947, he moved back to Germany where he founded the Berliner Ensemble. He was vastly influenced, having lived through two world wars he was very political and expressed his strong views through the medium of theatre.

Work

Brecht's main contribution to the theatrical world was the creation of epic theatre. He was strongly against Cathartic theatre and thought that naturalistic theatre mirrored society. He wanted to change things, to use theatre to get the audience thinking. One famous quote of his " Hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom." emphasised his desire to engage the audience. However, whilst he wanted to engage the audience he didn't want them to become attached or emotionally involved in characters or the piece itself, as he believed this made the audience lose their ability to judge and think. He wanted them to be distant from emotions, after all they were watching a presentation of life, not life itself.

Verfremdungseffect

This term is also known as the alienation effect, however, Brecht only wanted his audience to feel distanced, of course he wanted them to be engaged and excited but not emotionally involved and this always involved breaking the forth wall.

He used a range of  techniques in his performances. They included...

• Narration
• Coming out of role
• Speaking stage directions
• Directly addressing audience
• Using placards
• Multi rolling
• Minimal props
• Symbolic props
• Symbolic lighting
• Song and dance
• Montage
• Spass (fun)
• Gestus
• Non linear narrative
• Tableau

Today, we were split into groups and asked to come up with our interpretation of A Caucasian Chalk Circle. 

We began by listing the large number of characters in the 5 pages given to us. Obviously, there were more characters than actors, so we had to use multi rolling. In addition I decided to take the role of  a narrator and speak the stage directions, as this was a technique used by Brecht, ad I thought it looked rather quirky too. We added some accents for spass! and decided to label props in the style as he did too. For example, we labelled a piece of paper with Child, or guitar, to show that we were trying to think and adopt Brechts own techniques into our interpretation.