Brecht

written and compiled by Jeffrey Dawson

The rubric
Bertolt Brecht
Context of Brecht’s work
The historical and cultural context
The Arts
The Sciences
The political context
Features of Brechtian drama
Epic theatre
The stage
Technology
Acting style
Movement and gesture
The alienation effect
Music
Activities
The prescribed texts
The Threepenny Opera
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Mother Courage and Her Children
Life of Galileo
Additional Activities
Bibliography 

Rubric

This topic explores Bertolt Brecht’s epic staging, other dramatic techniques and his artistic and political goals. Students must explore experientially and theoretically the different ways Brecht sought to bring large and complex events onto the stage.

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was one of the most brilliant practitioners of the German Theatre. He was, and still is, regarded as one of the most influential figures in European theatre. He was born in Augsburg in Germany, the son of a manufacturer. He studied philosophy and natural science in Munich and Berlin. He wrote 39 plays, the first of which, Baal, was written in 1918.

Brecht was an innovative German playwright, theatre director and theoretician who changed the direction of European theatre; and indeed world theatre. His work was as groundbreaking as Ibsen and his concept of Realism. Brecht's influence was not only in the realm of political playwriting. He was also a theorist who introduced the concepts of Epic Theatre, "alienation" and "gestus". He opened up more possibilities of how the stage could be used and for what purpose.

In order to understand Brecht it is necessary to understand his interpretation of Marxist "dialectics" of theory and practice, as this is the basis of his rejection of Naturalism on the stage and of the bourgeois theatre of the time in Germany. In 1949, to produce his plays and to embody his theories, and those of Communist theatre practitioner and director, Erwin Piscator,  he formed a theatre company-the Berliner Ensemble-which became the most important and influential theatre in postwar Europe.

Bertolt Brecht was also a great poet and song writer, and was probably the closest equivalent to Shakespeare that the rest of Europe has produced. Many of Brecht's plays, like Shakespeare's, were adaptations (such as his adaptation of John Gay's Threepenny Opera), but in his hands they became completely fresh works.

The Threepenny Opera, 1994, Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Simon Phillips (grateful acknowledgement to STC Archives). (Click picture to view full-size)

When the Nazi Party came to power, Brecht left Germany and lived in exile in Scandinavia and the USA, where he continued writing plays. In 1948 he accepted an offer from the East German government to return to Berlin with his actress wife, Helene Weigel.

The context of Brecht’s work

In order to explore Brecht’s theatre, it is important to understand the historical, political, social and cultural context of Germany from the 1920s to the 1950s, especially the Weimar Republic (1918­–1933).

Germany has a rich artistic and literary heritage. It was home to some of the world's most influential philosophers, writers and composers, such as  Goethe (1749-1832), who, like Brecht, was a poet, dramatist and novelist and wrote his classic text Faust.

The historical and cultural context

The Weimar Republic (named after a city in SW East Germany), however controversial in economic and political terms, was a fertile ground for  modern arts and sciences. Berlin, in particular, became a thriving centre for many new art movements such as Dadaism, Expressionism and the Bauhaus.

The Arts

• In Literature, Thomas Mann explored the limits of modernist writing.
• The Bauhaus school, near Weimar, revolutionised architecture.
• The theory and practices of the theatres in Berlin and Frankfurt led to a revolution on stage. Bertolt Brecht broke with old traditions of play writing with his Marxist political intentions, and Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator became world famous stage directors.
• Great film companies made German cinema one of the most notable in the world (a position it never again achieved).
• Leading composers of atonal music taught and heard their works first performed in Weimar Germany.
• The artist George Grosz painted bitter, satirical images.
• The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research developed theories inspired by a synthesis of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis that became highly influential in twentieth-century thought.

The Sciences

• The Weimar Republic "inherited" excellent universities and science centres.
• Göttingen was the world's most famous centre for physics, and German was the international language in physics and chemistry.
• Michael Frayn's absorbing play Copenhagen was based on the groundbreaking work of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the area of quantum mechanics and the splitting of the atom. Albert Einstein lived and taught in Berlin.

Much of Weimar culture showed great interest in the United States, and historians have spoken of an Americanisation of German culture during the Weimar years. For example, the assembly line technique (developed in the American automobile industry), the skyscraper, styles of American mass consumerism and advertising seemed the epitome of modern ideas to Weimar artists. They adapted some American forms but often used them critically and creatively.

There was also a strong influence of Russian modernism on Weimar culture. The posters, graphics, and architecture of the young Soviet Union artists, the Constructivists, seemed to represent the manifestations of a new and more humane world to many Weimar artists.

Many of the rich developments in the arts and sciences had their origins in pre-WWII Germany, and the Weimar Republic encouraged them and became identified with them. This was a mixed blessing, however, since a broad segment of the public, including conservative academics, church leaders and journalists in Germany (and elsewhere), saw the new trends in culture and thought as a threat to civilisation and an affront to good taste. Right wing conservatives considered that Weimar Culture confirmed the image of a hedonistic, amoral and degenerate society. The fact that many leading artists, including Brecht and his actress wife Helene Weigel, associated with the Communist Party (which was fashionable in intellectual circles all over Europe) or with other forms of Socialism, branded the new trends as doubly dangerous. (In fact, the German Communist Party welcomed much of this artistic help and featured avantgarde theatre and film in its propaganda.) The strong representation of Jews among the new Weimar artists  was also used by the extreme right wing to label it  a "Judaised Republic."

When the Nazis came to power, most of the exponents of Weimar culture had to emigrate and live in exile. Hitler declared many of its as "degenerate" art. The public book burning organised by Goebbels in 1933 condemned modernist thought and writing by Jews and non-Jews. The unique activity of German Jews, in the  arts and sciences came to an end. Many physicists, social scientists, film directors, writers and artists including Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, emigrated to the United States, which thus inherited Weimar culture. However, the Nazis' break with Weimar culture was not as strict as some historians have assumed.  Nazi architecture and art tended to mix classical patterns with some modernist elements, which produced an unattractive, bombastic style.

Images of the changes that Hitler brought to German society were represented by popular artists such as George Grosz, a contemporary of Brecht's who even painted backdrops for a Piscator production of one of Brecht's plays. Grosz's political intentions were similar to Brecht's. Grosz saw himself in the role of prosecutor of every kind of political corruption. His paintings are well worth finding for a satiric visual representation of German society from the 1920s until his death in 1959. Look out especially for his illustration of Hitler as an industrialist/capitalist for Brecht's The Three Soldiers in 1930, and his equally socially aware drawing of The Robbers which Penguin Books have used as a cover illustration for Brecht's Threepenny Novel. Grosz's distinctive thick black line has been highly influential in contemporary graphic design.

An excellent web site for Professor Gerhard Rempel of the Western New England College and his alternative views on the cultural life of the Weimar Republic is: Culture Life in the Republic

An excellent web site for the historical background to the Weimar Republic, and links to a helpful time line of the Weimar era, (1919–1933) and beyond is: http://europeanhistory.about.com/cs/weimarrepublic/

The political context

Brecht began writing his influential musical plays like The Threepenny Opera in the 1920s.  At the same time he began a serious study of the works of Karl Marx, such as the revolutionary Das Kapital. Brecht's reading of Marxism and the application of its concept of dialectics, influenced his most important and innovative ideas for theatre. From Marxism, Brecht took a revolutionary stance-not only towards the class struggle, but also towards the representation of bourgeois realism on stage.

This quotation from The Threepenny Opera clearly shows are his revolutionary intentions.

Mr J.J. Peachum, the wily businessman, who runs an agency for beggars, tells his wife in "First Threepenny Finale: The Uncertainty of Human Circumstances":

We all would practise charity and love:
To give the poor our money, must be right.
When Man is good, God's kingdom's not far off;
Who wouldn't like to bask in Heaven's light?
We all would practise charity and love.
But sad to say, this earth is far from Heaven,
Man's life is squalid, Man himself is low.
We all would like to live in peace forever,
But the conditions here? Won't have it so.

... Of course it must be understood,
The world and Man are no damn good.
Who wouldn't like a paradise right here?
Things being as they are, will it appear?
No, you can bet your boots it won't.
Your brother may be fond of you,
But if the food won't do for two,
He'll kick you in your ugly face,

Disloyalty is no disgrace.

In his book Das Kapital, Marx argued that the division of labour in modern industrial society had changed the relationship between humankind and the world. He argued that, in modern industry, workers sold their labour in order to produce commodities or products. These commodities then seemed alien in that they seem to have been produced magically. Capitalistic production did not reveal the signs of its production, so products come to have a natural life of their own.

Similarly, Brecht argued that Realistic theatre presented and reinforced a particular political vision, a view of society as the inevitable product of evolution and history, and therefore not susceptible to change. For Brecht, the realism of the time, which was based on bourgeois ideals and characters, was a biased representation of social reality. Brecht reinterpreted Marx's concept of alienationas a theatrical ideology, in order to displace realism and to show up the hidden agenda of the theatre of the time.

Under Capitalism, Marx contended that, where everything is a product for sale, all human lives, relationships and values become products. The workers become dehumanised and are incorporated into the machinery of production. The pervading world view of Capitalism, where products confront workers as something natural and entirely separate from their makers, was to Marx a false one, perpetuated to the political advantage of the wealthy ruling classes.

Brecht's theatre aimed to provide its audience with ways of looking at bourgeois reality, (including Naturalistic Drama), as unnatural as a political ideology produced in the interests of profiteering. Brecht's theatre sought, therefore, to alienate or estrange the audience from everyday reality so that it could  be reinterpreted in a new light. He wanted the audience to sit back from their views of events that they had come to see as natural and inevitable, and question the world created by Capitalism and the society it sustained.

In his essay The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre, Brecht stated that his theatre work is based on a "radical separation of the elements of production," (see alienation effect in the notes below) rather than the unity of action seen in Realism. This realistic illusion Brecht found to be dishonest, in that it seduced the audience to accept subliminally  its representation of reality as a natural and apolitical view of the world.  He wanted the audience to rethink and redefine its world view. By contrast to the Realistic theatre, Brecht's theatre always shows dramatic illusion in its characterisation, setting, action and techniques such as the alienation effect of using screens featuring captions to reveal the forthcoming action.

Such theatre making, involving theatre effects and machinery, and distancing acting techniques on stage, makes the audience aware that the means of production in his theatre is the message he is trying to communicate to them, that stage realism, like life outside the theatre, is made, not given. These ideas are, in turn, a rejection of the Stanislavsky System of acting, involving the character's given circumstances and the accruing of naturalistic details.

Brecht was criticised by the Communist Party for not using social realism because his problem-based Epic Theatre failed to provide solutions. But Brecht, of course, didn't want to immerse his audience in reality. Instead he wanted them to "cry tears from the brain,"  to absorb messages and ideas on which they could act.

Features of Brechtian drama

Epic Theatre

Brecht called his theatre work by a variety of names, including Epic Theatre, the term now generally used to describe Brecht's plays.  His plays tend to be episodic, written as a seemingly disconnected, open-ended montage of scenes presented in a non-naturalistic, non-chronological way. The audience needs to arrive at its own conclusion of how the events are linked together.  

Epic Theatre presents a sequence of incidents or events that are narrated on a grand scale without the restrictions of time, place or formal plot.

The stage

Brecht usually left the stage bare in his productions as a means of preventing the audience from experiencing a detailed illusion of reality, of some fictional dramatic location. He exposed stage machinery, opened up the physical staging to the wings and often exposed the back wall. He also exposed the lighting grid above the stage so the audience could see how lights influence the mood of the scene and influence the audience's judgment.

Technology

The German theatre director, Erwin Piscator, greatly influenced Brecht because he advocated  the use of new technologies in the theatre as a means of developing a kind of performance more like the mechanised and accelerated routines of modern life. Brecht used technological effects to fragment the realistic unity of the setting. For instance, he projected films and text on screens above the stage, forcing the audience to relate the action onstage to recent or other historical or social events. (This technique is called historification). He also used placards that  announced the action to take place before the scene began, discordant music, songs, constructivist scenery such as scaffolding, projected images and films.

Acting style

Brecht also developed his own acting style for his work. He urged his actors not to empathise totally with their characters, but  to stand outside them and illustrate their behaviour. Brecht's actors were asked to go beyond the Stanislavsky system of acting, where the actor identifies entirely with their character and represents the character entirely from his or her point of view. Rather Brecht encouraged a more demonstrative acting method, one that enables the actor to present the character from a number of perspectives.

Movement and gesture

The term gestus or grandgestus as used by Brecht, referred to everything an actor did in terms of gesture, stance, body language, facial expressions and intonations in order to show the significance of a scene. The ideal would be that the storyline could be broken down so that each scene can appear as one single action that can be translated into one simple sentence, so that the gestus,( the most important message of the scene), could be made clear.

He was also influenced by the theatre of Asia with its use of mime and gesture, clear precise vocal work, symbolic characters and graceful, rhythmic movement. He encouraged his actors to be physically fit and flexible, as his plays sometimes required dance, mime and even acrobatics.

Brecht's theatre poems demonstrate his ideas of adopting a new acting style. In "On Everyday Theatre" in Poems of the Crisis Years 1929-1933, Brecht advises actors to observe:

that theatre whose setting is the street.
The everyday, thousandfold, fameless
But vivid, earthy theatre fed by the daily human contact
Which takes place in the street.
Here the woman from next door imitates the landlord:
Demonstrating his flood of talk she makes it clear
How he tried to turn the conversation
From the burst water pipe...A drunk
Gives us the preacher at his sermon, referring the poor
To the rich pastures of paradise. How useful
Such theatre is though, serious and funny
And how dignified! They do not, like parrot or ape
Imitate just for the sake of imitation, unconcerned
What they imitate, just to show that they
Can imitate; no, they
Have a point to put across."

The alienation effect

Brecht also developed the concept of verfremdungseffekt or  the alienation effect (sometimes referred to  simply as the A-effect).  This is one of the principal ideals in Brecht's theory of Drama. Verfremdungseffect translates as “to make strange”. It requires the audience and actors to retain a degree of critical detachment from a play and its performance, to be objective and not empathise or identify with the characters or the events that take place in the play. Brecht used various theatrical devices to shock the audience, and keep them conscious of the fact that it was a theatrical performance they were witnessing and that he wanted them to respond in a distanced, objective manner. Some of these techniques included changing the scenery in front of the audience, projections, treadmills, hoists and musicians on the stage.

Through using these techniques, Brecht aimed to involve the audience in the process of the play's production and what it was communicating. The audience of Epic Theatre is, therefore invited to consider and enjoy how the theatre fabricates its fiction, rather than passively accepting an illusion of reality onstage. This is Brecht's method of teaching the audience to adopt a more critical, alienated way of seeing real life. Thus the intention of his theatre practice is didactic.
Brecht wanted to distance his audience emotionally from the action of his plays, unlike Polly Peachum's businessman father, Mr J.J. Peachum, who tells his daughter in The Threepenny Opera, "There is of course a difference between playing on people's feelings and getting on their nerves. Only an artist can still play on people's feelings nowadays."

The Threepenny Opera, 1994, Costume Designs by Tracy Grant, Sydney Theatre Company Production. (Click picture to view full-size)

Music

He also used music to underline the ideas in his plays and collaborated with the composers Kurt Weill and Paul Dessau to include music as a vital ingredient of his productions.

Brecht's incisive lyrics and Kurt Weill's atonal 'melodies' continue to be used today by musicians such as Robyn Archer, Nick Cave, Marianne Faithfull, P.J.Harvey, Elvis Costello and Sting - who has produced the entire score of The Threepenny Opera. Thus, their music, and hence the culture and history behind it, have been taken all over the world. In 1997 their music reached further audiences with the release of September Songs on a CD which even featured Brecht himself and his spoken version of Mack the Knife.

Activities

Playbuilding

Aim:  to gain a practical understanding of the Brechtian concept of Verfrumdungseffekt or alienation effect.
Intention:

1. To help the audience understand that they are seeing actors   presenting a play - a Brechtian 'alienation effect.'
2. To leave the audience believing that life should not be like that and that they can do something to change it

Setting: A long cafe  table, as part of a stage setting of a cafe. Keep the setting very simple as befits a piece of epic theatre.
Task:  Devise a simple situation based on a group of writers discussing their problem with writer's block in a play about writers.

Groups : five to six

Ideas:  

• The actors could enter the performance space as actors who are going to perform, have their costumes hanging on the stage, do a warm-up etc.
• They could constantly inform the audience about what is going to happen by means of cards, slides etc and  underline the theme of the  play by representing it musically as well in a parody based on a popular song.
• Each writer could have a particular writing form, whether it be a play, a screenplay, a television script, a novel or a poem. One may even be an Arts journalist.
• This could be brainstormed beforehand.

Develop an interesting plot in rehearsal which shows an understanding of the topic.
Develop characters, their attitudes and the way they relate to one another in a presentational acting style.

Discussion
How would this scene be represented differently in a Realist acting style?

Oral reflection
Debate Brecht's view of bourgeois theatre.

Further information on Brecht and exercises using his theory can be found in:

Crawford, Hurst, Lugering, Wimmer. 2003, Acting in Person and Style in Australia,(Chapter 16, Brecht : Epic Style and Didacticism), McGraw-Hill, Sydney.
Burton, Bruce. 2001, Living Drama : Third Edition (Chapter 3 of Unit 4), Longman Cheshire, Sydney.
Burton, Bruce. 1991, Act of Learning –The Drama –Theatre Continuum in the Classroom, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne.

The prescribed texts

The Threepenny Opera(1928)

The Threepenny Opera, 1994, Directed by Simon Phillips, Sydney Theatre Company Production. (Click picture to view full-size)

The Threepenny Opera is a dry, humorous and biting satire of decayed capitalism. It was adapted from  John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, first performed at Lincoln’s Inn  Fields in 1728. Indeed a narrator announces from the outset that we are about to witness "an opera for beggars. Conceived with a magnificence such as only beggars could imagine, and an economy such as only beggars could afford ... The Threepenny Opera."

Gay's 18th Century characters are all here, MacHeath: the crook and pimp, Polly Peachum and Jenny, Mack's favourite whore; but Brecht's London is a sordid Dickensian city, and the time is about 1900 before, during and after the Coronation of Queen Victoria. And all the crooked deals of the thieves, pimps and whores are linked to the Boer War military supply.  Brecht and his co-adaptor and secretary, Elisabeth Hauptmann, updated Gay's text to the Victorian underworld.

In the overture, written by Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, we are introduced to the infamous Mack the Knife:

Now the shark has teeth like razors
In his mouth for all to see:
All MacHeath has is a flick-knife,
Which he carries secretly.

And the shark's fins turn to scarlet,
When his victim's blood is spilt:
But MacHeath wears clean white gloves, which
Show no evidence of guilt.

Where the Thames flows, green and swollen,
Men will suddenly fall down.
But it isn't plague or cholera:
Mack the Knife is back in town.

This evocative and provocative song later became a hit and has been recorded by such diverse artists as Brecht himself, Bobby Darin in the 1950s and Australian singer Nick Cave more recently. This hit status is ironic, not only for its controversial content, but for its Weimar Republic cabaret style. Indeed composer Weill is noted for his atonal music and serious modernist style.

The 1997 Sony Music CD, September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill contains both the Brecht and Cave renditions. It also features a version by Kurt Weill's wife, singer Lotte Lenya, whose performance as Jenny made her the toast of Europe in the 1920s.

From its premiere by the Berliner Ensemble (at its favourite venue, the Theatre at Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin), Threepenny Opera was a scandalous success. Even though its basis was two centuries old almost to the day, it was modern, sexual and embedded in urgent and current anti-capitalistic politics. Its design was intentionally shabby – for instance its musical score contained seductive pop tunes with cynical streetwise lyrics.

The Threepenny Opera, 1994, Sydney Theatre Company Production. (Click picture to view full-size)

Threepenny Opera is about the division of business interests between Peachum and MacHeath, who rely respectively on oppression and prostitution for their profits. The two become legitimate defenders of the bourgeois social order and morality and both conspire closely with the police. However, conflict emerges when MacHeath decides to marry Peachum's daughter, Polly. Police chief, Brown, is invited to the wedding in a stable that has been converted for the glittering reception. Peachum sees his daughter's marriage as a slight on his business and betrays his son-in-law to the police. Meanwhile MacHeath has continued to visit his favourite prostitute “Pirate” Jenny and she denounces him too.

The unheralded climax occurs when Queen Victoria's messenger breaks into the gallows, the scene of MacHeath's execution, and grants him Her royal pardon and a knighthood!

Brecht had been reading Marxist dialectics and embraced his economic theories before adapting Threepenny Opera, so he was confused when it was so successful with the bourgeoisie.  His German bourgeois audience had a sizeable respect for both religion and money, which he was trying to satirise in the play! And neither Brecht nor Weill intended to have the continent whistling its tunes; one of which has Mrs Peachum singing about sex slavery! He even denigrated the role of religion, Christianity in particular, through Polly Peachum's businessman father, Mr J.J. Peachum, proprietor of the firm, The Beggar's Friend, (a beggar's agency), when he sings in "Mr Peachum's Morning Chorale":

There's not much that taps
the wellsprings of the human heart, and even
that little there is, doesn't work too well,
once you've used it a few times. People have a
terrible capacity for turning their feelings on
and off at will...

There are about four or five sentences in the Bible
That go straight to the heart: once they've been
used up, that's the end of that”.

The Threepenny Opera, 1994, Sydney Theatre Company Production. (Click picture to view full-size)

Rather than identify with the musical's exposition of corruption, the audience took to Threepenny Opera to justify its own hedonism and decadence. In 1928 it played over a thousand performances in Berlin and received over 30 European productions in its first year.  It will be revived in Sydney by Company B, at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills later this year, directed by young innovative director, Benedict Andrews. In its pre-publicity Company B states, "Seventy-five years on it is still an explosive work. Its classic status has too often set it at a comfortable distance, but in the world of sports-shoe sweatshops and stockpiled food, its questions still (and will) roar".

Brecht said he would be remembered for his line in Threepenny Opera: “Food first and morals later”.

Costume designs by Tracy Grant for The Threepenny Opera, 1994, Sydney Theatre Company Production. (Click pictures to view full-size)

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945)

The Caucasian Chalk Circle is an outstanding example of Brecht's epic theatre. It is a parable inspired by the Chinese play Chalk Circle. Written at the close of World War II, the story is set in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, and retells the tale of King Solomon and a child claimed by two mothers. A chalk circle is metaphorically drawn around a society that has misdirected priorities. Brecht's statements about class are cloaked in the innocence of a fable that whispers insistently to the audience and introduced a new way of thinking about the theatre.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle begins with a Prologue that deals with a dispute over a valley. Two groups of peasants want to claim a valley that was abandoned during WW II when the Germans invaded. One group used to live in the valley and herded goats there. The other group is from a neighbouring valley and hopes to plant fruit trees. A delegate has been sent to arbitrate the dispute. The fruit growers explain that they have elaborate plans to irrigate the valley and produce a tremendous amount of food. The goat-herders claim the land based on the fact that they have always lived there. In the end, the fruit farmers get the valley because they will use the land better. The peasants then hold a small party and a singer agrees to tell them the story of the Chalk Circle.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle is actually two stories that come together at the end. The first story is that of Grusha and the second story is that of Azdak. Both stories begin in a Caucasian City ruled by a Governor, who serves a Grand Duke. The Governor has just had a child, Michael, and his wife, Natella, is incredibly jealous of the attention that he gives to his son. The Governor's brother, the Fat Prince, stages an insurrection on Easter Sunday. He kills the Governor and forces the Governor's wife to flee. In her haste, she leaves behind her child. The Grand Duke and many of the soldiers flee as well.

Grusha, a kitchen maid, becomes engaged to a soldier named Simon. Soon after, during the coup, Michael is handed to her. She hides the child from the Fat Prince and his soldiers, thereby saving the child's life. She then takes Michael with her and flees the city, heading north. After spending most of her money and risking her life for the child, she arrives at her brother's house. He allows her to live there over the winter.

When spring arrives, Grusha's brother forces her to marry a "dying" man from across the mountain. They hold a wedding, but during the reception the guests learn that the war is over and that the Grand Duke has raised an army and returned. The "dying" man, Jussup, realizes that he can no longer be drafted into the war. He miraculously recovers and throws all the guests out of the house. Grusha, now stuck with a husband she did not want, is forced to become a good wife to him.

Simon returns and learns that she is married. He is even more upset when he sees Michael, whom he thinks is Grusha's child. Some soldiers arrive and take Michael away from her, claiming that Michael belongs to the Governor's wife. Grusha follows them back to the city.

The next story that is told is that of Azdak. The plot returns to the night of the Fat Prince's insurrection. Azdak finds a fugitive and saves the man's life. The man turns out to be the Grand Duke. Realising that he could be branded a traitor, Azdak walks into town and reveals that he saved the Grand Duke's life. The soldiers refuse to believe him and he is released. The Fat Prince  shows up with his nephew, whom he wants to make the new judge. However, he agrees to let the soldiers decide who the next judge should be. After staging a mock trial, they choose Azdak.

He then judges four very strange cases, ruling in each case in favour of the poor person. Azdak   gains a reputation for supporting the poor.  Two years later the Grand Duke returns. Azdak is arrested as a "traitor" by the soldiers and is about to be killed by them. However, the Grand Duke, remembering that Azdak saved his life, reappoints Azdak to be the judge, thereby saving his life.

Azdak now takes over the case of Grusha and the child. The Governor's wife wants Michael back because without Michael she cannot take over the former Governor's estates. Grusha wants to keep the child, whom she has raised for the past two years. Even Simon goes to the trial and promises Grusha that he will support her.

After hearing all the arguments and learning about what Grusha has done to take care of the child, Azdak orders a Chalk Circle to be drawn. He places the child in the middle and orders the two women to pull, saying that whichever woman can pull the child out of the circle will get him. The Governor's wife pulls, but  Grusha lets go. Azdak orders them to do it again, and again Grusha lets go. Azdak then gives Michael to Grusha and orders the Governor's wife to leave. He confiscates Michael's estates and makes them into public gardens. His last act is to give Grusha a divorce, thereby allowing her to marry Simon. During the dancing that follows, Azdak disappears forever.

Brecht saw this play as a "parable for the theatre" and has the Singer directly address the audience at the end of the play, making no secret of his intention:

But you, you who have listened to the story of the Chalk Circle,

Take note what men of old concluded:
That what there is shall go to those who are good for it,

Children to the motherly, that they prosper,
Carts to good drivers, that they be driven well,
The valley to the waterers, that it yield fruit .

Synopsis
An excellent web site for a full summary and analysis of The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht, written by Harvard students is Classic Notes: The Caucasian Chalk Circle: (http://www.classicnote.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/chalkcircle )

Mother Courage and Her Children (1936–39)

Mother Courage and Her Children was written when Brecht was in self-exile in Sweden on the eve of World War II. It is typical of Brecht's theatrical innovation and political intention.  It represents Europe's Thirty Years' War in the spring of 1624 through the scheming canteen woman, Anna Fierling, known by  the name of Mother Courage. The audience follows the Swedish and Imperial armies through this war between Catholics and Protestants.

The  play aims to challenge the audience's assumptions about a variety of social institutions, including war, business, motherhood and morality, rather than directly stating a thesis on these themes.  Mother Courage and Her Children invites the audience to alienate itself from its cosy position and reconsider its view of the world.

Brecht himself stated in his book of set models that he wanted to show in this play that "war, which is a continuation of business by other means, makes the human virtues fatal to their possessors". Brecht's play considers this problem in a variety of challenging ways. Why is the protagonist called Courage? Is she courageous? As a tragic heroine, the play constantly confronts her heroic survival and status, and our own attitudes about the distinctions between war, business and morality. Mother Courage herself doesn't change, but sells a belt buckle and loses a son as part of the same transaction. As Scene One demonstrates, war and business create an all-pervasive market in which everything becomes a commodity that is for sale. 

Much of the impact of Mother Courage and Her Children comes from its use of a bare, physical space representing a country road near a town and a few significant props. Courage's home, her covered wagon, is her means of survival as well as her means of transport and production, hence it becomes like the play's central character. Placing it on a revolve, as many productions tend to do, conveys a sense that the wagon is almost always in motion, yet never actually going anywhere nor reaching any destination.  Courage enters the action singing about being business folk, with her two sons and her dumb daughter Kattrin. To army captains, she introduces herself as "Mother Courage with her wagon, full of the finest boots they make," and other soldiers' victuals. She later leaves the stage singing the same song saying, “she's got to be back in business again".

Courage's situation is symbolised by the wagon. In Scene One it is full of goods and drawn by her two strong sons.  In the final scene it is battered and empty and is pulled by Mother Courage herself as she struggles to keep up with the army. Brecht wanted to represent the wagon as the play's economic and material base to illuminate the play's moral themes. He used Courage's washing line in Scene Three to link her wagon to the cannon, tying war, the economy and domesticity together. Brecht raised the harness poles to represent a crucifix after the death of Courage's son, Swiss Cheese.

Mother Courage sees the Thirty Years' War as divorced from her, as she goes about making a living out of it. The fact that she is a minor, but very important cog in the war, doesn't occur to her. She is too self-interested. She loses her three children to it, yet she never learns. When Brecht founded the Berliner Ensemble, the German Government wanted him to change the ending so that she does learn. Brecht said, "Surely it is enough that the audience learns” and left it at that. He didn't want the audience to feel sympathy for someone who wouldn't learn from their mistakes. In his Realist plays Ibsen says, "This is life, isn't it terrible." Brecht says, "This is life, fix it."

Brecht directed his wife Helene Weigel as Courage in a definitive production for the Berliner Ensemble in 1949. Weigel shared Brecht’s Communist beliefs and aesthetic militancy. Helene Weigel came up with a magic moment as Courage, when she slowly counted out  pennies from her purse and bit the coins to check their authenticity, as she paid the peasants to bury Kattrin at the end of the play. This is the kind of detail that Brecht wanted to make happen in the theatre­— a moment when a simple gesture forces the audience to stand back from the action, reassess the scene, and  question the relationship between its ideas of maternal identity and morality and the society that gives them shape and meaning. Wiegel made the part an institution for the Berliner Ensemble for years. This play was also Brecht's reaction against German romanticism. He wanted the parable of the play, its "warning voice to be heard from the stages of various great cities, proclaiming that he who would sup with the Devil must use a long spoon."

Sydney-based actor Kerry Walker has played Courage twice and she says: "The actor must be divorced from her role with Brecht. It is an almost critical attitude. You stand outside the role — as should the audience. You see his or her point of view. You want the audience to say 'You silly old harridan, it's all your own fault’. Brecht didn't want it to be a night of emotion in the theatre. He wanted it to be a night of reason for the audience.  You don't get carried away. You're not supposed to think, 'poor old Mother Courage, you've lost your children, but rather — 'I like you. I think you're a fool. I see your point of view. But you had the options — things needn't have been like this.”

Walker has a very cerebral response to a cerebral play. "Basically Brecht wants the audience not to identify with the characters or be swept away by the emotion, but to see it all played out before them while they sit in judgement. To see why things might not have been like this. There is also a tension between the actor and the text. Generally actors are brought up in a naturalistic way where you get right inside the character and become the character to a certain extent, whereas in the Brechtian style of acting there is a gap, a distance, so the anger of the actor is added to Brecht's anger."

Kerry Walker says that the music of Mother Courage and Her Children, in its original score by Paul Dessau, attempts at objectivity too. "It's fabulous music, but there's a terrific tension between the music and the words, and so they're not toe-tapping numbers that you can leave the theatre humming. It forces you to listen to what the character - and hence, what Brecht is saying”.

The play's dramatic impact and its moral force are timeless and splendidly naïve. Brecht said in 1939,  "I do not consider being naïve a disgrace.

It is against war, brutality and lying shams: it is for honesty, courage, love and humanity. It expects its audience to use their heads and understand and forgive where necessary”.

An excellent web site for Brecht's Mother Courage resources is ClassicNotes: Mother Courage and Her Children: (www.classicnote.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/mothercourage ) 

Life of Galileo (1943)

Life of Galileo, 1996, Sydney Theatre Company Production (grateful acknowledgement to STC Archives). (Click picture to view full-size)

This play depicts the Renaissance scientist Galileo Galilei in a brutal struggle for freedom from authoritarian dogma. Unable to resist his appetite for scientific investigation, Galileo comes into conflict with the Inquisition and must publicly renounce his theories.

Synopsis
1996
 An excellent web site for a summary of the 13 scenes of Brecht's Life of Galileo resources is: http://www.nd.edu/~tbarkes/galileosynop.html

Costume sketches by Terry Ryan for Life of Galileo,1996, (grateful acknowledgement STC Archives). (Click pictures to view full-size)

Additional activities

On the Background

1. Use the Internet or the library to make a brief study of one of the aspects of German culture, society or history before, during and post-WW2 (e.g. an arts correspondent); an exiled artist suspected of having Communist sympathies; the demise of the Weimar Republic.
2. Imagine you are a German TV reporter presenting a short introduction or background to a story on how Brecht changed the theatre experience for actors and theatre workers and audiences alike and continues to do so.
3. Do an Internet search of current or forthcoming Brecht productions, like The Threepenny Opera by Company B at the Belvoir Street Theatre in November–December 2003.
4. Put yourself in the hot seat as a German actor who was challenged by Brecht's theories of alienation. 
5. Work with four or five others in the class to improvise an aspect of Brechtian practice such as  the difference in presentation of a scene shown naturalistically and then in an epic theatre style. Show the class a successful moment from the improvisation.

On the Prescribed texts

1. After reading the plays, and watching some German movies (e.g. Fritz Lang's Metropolis), or extracts from the movies, make a list of any similar stylistic features, themes and characters.
2. Select some speeches from the two plays you are studying and look carefully at their political intentions. Is it the same? In what ways does it differ? How does it differ from the way playwrights are examining social issues today
3. Try different ways of presenting the speeches e.g. as Hitler at a propaganda rally; as an American President at a State of the nation address; as a TV advertisement Voice Over; as a cabaret compere; as “Kath” or “Kim”; as Dame Edna.
   Discuss how the impact of the speech is affected by each presentation.
4. Write some script or lyrics for a song about something in the news that has challenged your value system? Perform the lines, firstly in a Realist, representational style to engage your audience emotionally, then in a Brechtian, presentational style, to distance them to make them make an objective, intellectual response.

On script interpretation

1. a) In pairs, or in threes if necessary, choose one or two pages of one of the scripts to study and perform. Have each pair chose extracts from different scenes and different characters to give a real overview of each play.
   b) Use the discussion you have had in class to inform the characters and  block and rehearse the scenes. Remember that voice and movement are important in Brechtian acting and that blocking can involve unusual ideas.
   c) Present the scenes in order— with a narrator and placards or posters or projections and discordant music in the manner of Brecht's epic theatre.
   d) Evaluate and discuss the interpretations, the blocking, the insights that have been made into characters, and any things that have become apparent in performance.
2. Make a quick bullet point summary on a large piece of paper or card of the things that can be learnt about the characters you portrayed from what they said, their actions and from what others say about them.
   Pin or stick this to a wall or window in the classroom under the title of the play. Use it for discussion and revision purposes.
3. In groups of 3-5 students, choose a scene you would like to perform. With one student as director, prepare the scene for a book-in-hand performance to the class.

Extension activities

1. Try to read or watch other Brechtian plays. Can you see stylistic and thematic connections between these plays and the prescribed texts?
2. Also go online to do further research on Brecht, epic theatre and his other techniques.
3. Elements of Production

Set design by Iain Aitken for The Threepenny Opera, 2000, Sydney Theatre Company Production. (Click picture to view full-size)

Look carefully at this photograph of the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of The Threepenny Opera  in 2000.

1. How does this set represent many of the techniques of Brecht's plays?
2. What dramatic features and forms could be used on such a setting?
3. How would you adapt the set and lighting designs to reinforce the play's shift in emphasis?
4. How could the actors use the space to convey Brecht's theories?
5. Sketch a design for your own set of  a production of one of the texts. Explain the mood that the set should evoke based on Brecht’s concept of the alienation effect.

Other Activities

Collect some examples of political texts such as newspaper headlines, photocopies of the covers of appropriate plays, poems and song lyrics, video, DVD and CD covers, paintings, photographs of war and/or protest. Make a collage of them on the notice board or a display board in the classroom.

Design a mock-up for a program for a production one of the plays you have studied, using an appropriate motif.

Compile a list of stage directions from the plays you studied and write a brief explanation of what they are/mean. Are these references easy for Australian audiences to understand?

Discussion points

• Why is the use of music important in the plays you studied?
• How would music contribute to the theatricality of productions of these texts? Make a list of some of the music you could use for each play.
• How does lighting contribute to the mood of each play? What effect do these lighting states achieve?

German Theatre Companies

The Berliner Ensemble, Berlin

Do an Internet search on past and present productions at this famous company founded by Brecht and his wife.

Check the web site of this theatre for current productions.

Bibliography

Willett, John (ed.)1964, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ("Notes on a Description of a New Technique of Acting", pages 142-147), Methuen, , London.
Willett, John (ed.) 1965, The Messingkauf Dialogues ("Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting", pages 91-99) Methuen, London.
Zarrilli, Phillip B. (ed.),1995, Acting (Re)-Considered ("Brecht and the Contradictory Actor", pages 228-241), Routledge, London.
Wright, Elizabeth. 1989, Postmodern Brecht - A Re-Presentation, Routledge, London.
Demetz, Peter (ed.), 1962, Brecht - A Collection of Critical Essays, A Spectrum Book: Prentice Hall Inc., New Jersey,
Thomson, P. & Sachs, G. (eds.), 1994, Cambridge Companion to Brecht, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Esslin, Martin, 1964  Brecht: A Choice of Evils, Methuen, London.
Innes, Christopher, 2001, Modern British Drama The Twentieth Century 2nd Edition,  ("Brechtian influences: Epic Stagecraft and British equivalents") Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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