Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht

1. Historical/social

   • His most famous plays include Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Brecht’s groundbreaking directing style has been hugely influential to many directors and designers over the decades.
   • Brecht was a Marxist and made his theatre highly political. He wanted his theatre to spark an interest in his audiences’ perception of the world.
   • Living in Munich during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes with theatre plays, whose themes were often influenced by his Marxist thought.
   • During the Nazi period and World War II he lived in exile, first in Scandinavia and then in the United States

2. Theatrical purpose

   • He did not want his audiences to sit passively and get lost in a show’s story, but to make them think and question the world they live in.
   • He encouraged them to be critical of society. His work was often mischievous, provocative and ironic.
   • Brecht wanted his audiences to remain objective and unemotional during his plays so that they could make rational judgments about the political aspects of his work.
     • To do this he invented a range of theatrical devices known as epic theatre.
   • Epic theatre
     • Epic theatre is a type of political theatre that addresses contemporary issues.
     • Brecht believed classical approaches to theatre were escapist, and he was more interested in facts and reality rather than escapism.
     • Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such, was changeable.
     • Verfremdungseffekt, or the ‘estrangement effect,’ was used to distance the audience from the play and is sometimes called the alienation effect.
     • Brecht did not want the audience to have any emotional attachment to his characters.