It is fair to say that Brecht was primarily interested in evolving a style of theatre that he referred to as 'Epic'. In his essay 'Die Strassenszene', (subtitled 'Grundmodell eines epischen Theaters'), he explains that 'to set up a basic model for epic theatre is comparatively easy' . He uses the example of an everyday street incident, somebody explaining to others about a traffic accident that he had seen. He goes on to say that 'the demonstrator acts the behaviour of driver or victim in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident', and that this demonstrator need not be an artist, since 'his demonstration would be spoilt if the bystanders' attention were drawn to his powers of transformation'. This is to say that the man need not cast the illusion over his audience that he purports to be the victim or the driver, but merely to show the 'repeat' of the accident, and that the social significance - in this case, whether or not the accident could have been avoided had the attitudes of one of the parties been any different - of his demonstration be present. The nature of that particular essay is essentially a reaction to the method acting techniques laid down by the Russian thespian Konstantin Stanislavsky. In his own work he cites an accident he had seen, in which an old beggar had been killed by a streetcar. The images of this accident had an effect on him that made him think back to a much more previous experience of his own, in which he had seen a weeping Italian leaning over a dead monkey, attempting to feed it. He goes on to explain that were he to stage the scene of the dead beggar, he would use the memory of what he felt seeing the dead monkey rather than the actual tragedy in order to convey the scene's emotion.
Brecht clearly uses Stanislavsky's methods as the platform for his theories to bound into definition. In his essay 'Building a Character', which is incidentally a title borrowed from a Stanislavsky work of the same name (he undoubtedly makes this allusion in order to…) Brecht underlines that the three phases of the actor's work are thus:
Let us again try to understand what Brecht means by Verfremdung. Mankind has undergone throughout its history many experiences of Verfremdung, that is, an event or occurrence that caused a 'distanciation' enabling them to look at their world anew. Popular religion, at least in the last few thousand years, divorced Man and God from Nature and the Earth, and encouraged humankind to regard themselves as 'superior' to and separate from the rest of the natural world. This dogma was in turn uprooted in the Age of Enlightenment, most notably being challenged when Darwin published his revolutionary tome 'Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection', in 1859. People were again forced to look at their species, their very existence, in a very different light. Possibly the ultimate Verfremdungsmoment in our history occurred a century later, when Yuri Gagarin rocketed past the stratosphere and became the first human being to physically see the Earth as a separate entity. For the first time we look upon our world from the outside; this not only displaced our collective perception of the planet, but a certain Verfremdungseffekt was at work. Brecht demands his audience sit aboard the Space Shuttle and watch how clouds form storms from a distance, to see rain fall from the opposite angle. Brecht noted that the Eskimo definition of a car as 'a wingless aircraft that crawls along the ground' is a way of 'alienating' the car, we see a car in terms of something else . Margaret Eddershaw comments, 'This making the familiar strange was not an original aesthetic idea, but Brecht's application of it to theatre and the resultant dramaturgical effects were new.'
It is this distancing effect that allows the audience to focus on the subject matter of the play, without forcing it to get caught up in catharsis. (As German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin explains, 'Epic theatre appeals to an interest group who do not 'think without reason'.') Brecht's plays employ several techniques of Verfremdung to achieve this. For example, in 'Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis' the spectator is informed from the outset that what they will be watching is a story, as told by a narrator just like the demonstrator who witnessed the car accident, and not necessarily a representation of the real. The narrator (or Sänger) frequently cuts into the play and tells the story of the action, negating the necessity of actually seeing the action. A good example of this can be found in the final scene of five, as Azdak is faced with the newly returned Governor's wife. The narrator informs the audience beforehand that the previous régime of the Fette Fürst is over and the Grand Duke has swept back into power. It is not necessary to act this on stage as it ultimately detracts from the story Brecht is telling. But like in the Strassenszene the action is essentially 'reported speech'. The actors must duly represent the narrator's own report of the legend, assisting storyteller to tell his story, which itself involves a certain dialectic with the audience. Walter Benjamin explains Brecht's attitude to audience: 'The audience, being a collective, will usually feel impelled to react promptly. This reaction, according to Brecht, ought to be a well-considered and therefore a relaxed one - in short, the reaction of people of have an interest in the matter.' So the audience is a major part of Brecht's equation . (Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal would later go on to develop his even more interactive 'forum theatre', exclaiming emphatically as only Boal can that: 'Without a doubt, Spectator is a bad word! He too must be a subject all these experiments of a people's theatre have the same objective - the liberation of the spectator, on whom the theatre has imposed finished visions of the world.').
One could therefore conclude that this style of acting is best suited to Brecht's style of writing, but there are those who insist that Brecht's best work are those which do not allow the audience to become detached from the work. However I feel that there is an amount of flexibility within Brecht. It is not solely the text that should be the basis for the performance after all; I feel that one of the tragedies of popular theatre is that there is a section of society too conservative too see Shakespeare transposed into the modern world, be it by Luhrmann's text-friendly and audience-conscious Romeo and Juliet, or by a simple reworking of the story such as West Side Story. Shakespeare would have undoubtedly, had he been alive today, taken Luhrmann's angle, as it brought the relevance of the tale out for the public to enjoy, without worrying about recreating Elizabethan times for the purists. After all, theatre was far from staid and dour in those days, and the entertainment that William Shakespeare and his contemporaries had to contend with in order to build up the stage play as a profitable and popular attraction were prostitution, cock-fighting and bear-baiting. Similarly in Brecht, it is important for those involved to take a serious interest in the subject matter, even if that means chopping and changing certain areas (certainly Brecht and scissors should be no distant strangers). I am sure that Shakespeare too would approve of his work being played with. After all, he never wished for his work to be published, at least not in his lifetime, and people worrying about not remaining true to the bard should remember that he famously spelled his name scores of different ways, and the only one he never actually used was 'Shakespeare'. Therefore to read Brecht today is to read the Bible or the Koran, one must apply it to the relevant issues of the day. It is with this in mind that I turn back to our own production of Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis.
We decided that to stage this play we would need to perform a large amount of editing, for two reasons. Firstly, due to the lack of available actors we had to double up on most of the major roles, not to mention the minor ones, so in order to make line-learning easier the director Thomas Ecke set about reducing the play by almost half. He took out all the songs, not just to speed up the story but also because of our own lack of musical ability to pull them off. It is important to remember that yes, we as performers need not necessarily be skilled artists, but for editing purposes it was decided that the songs would be the best choice for the waste basket. Secondly, we had the audience in mind - we were not altogether confident that an audience would not necessarily wish to sit through three hours of very amateur performing, especially with singers who could not sing. They may well become interested in the play's deeper meaning, and the lack of artistry may be an distanciation effect, but Brecht himself doesn't believe that the critical attitude need necessarily be an inartistic one, but in fact essential: 'To introduce this critical attitude into art, the negative element which it doubtless includes must be shown from its positive side: this criticism of the world is active, practical, positive.' We wanted the audience to be an essential part of the production - we at least wanted them to stay for the second half! However coming back to the relevance of Brecht in the late 1990s, we decided to axe the first act, the prologue to the legend of the Chalk Circle, set in a Georgian valley the post-World War Two Soviet Union, after the nazis had left. The people who had fled the valley were returning and there was a dispute over the true owners of the land, who had most right to be there, between those who the land actually belonged to, or those who wished to love and cultivate the land, helping it grow. Very Marxist ideals emerging here. In disposing of this story one of the play's major Verfremdungseffekts was disrupted. The audience could only see the story of the chalk circle, without being forced to compare it with a contemporary or any other story. This was ultimately, on our part, done for the sake of shortening the play, but looking back we had a perfect contemporary situation with which to replace the prologue: the Kosovo situation. There, the land is in dispute - the Kosovar Albanians made up ninety percent of the population and had been living there for centuries, loving the land, yet that land is indisputably part of Serbia, more so than Belgrade even. It is the birthplace of Serbian culture, the scene of the battle in which they were defeated by the Turks in the fourteenth century, and is more fundamental to their national identity than Hastings is to England or Bannockburn to the Scottish. It would have been a perfect opportunity to replace the Caucasian valleys with those of southern Yugoslavia, the Balkan Chalk Circle even. That would have detached the original text-lovers from Brecht's play and let them see something they could think about.
I would like to turn back to the performance as a whole, though. The entire staging of the play was I feel very much in the vein of 'acting in quotation marks', right down to the set design. In rehearsals, when we were fleshing out our characters, we did try to keep in mind that this was a story being told by the Sänger, and believed that ultimately that character could bail us out in his (or in our case, her) story. Brecht however would try many exercises so that his actors could understand their parts and get to that post-Stanislavskian third step as described above. In rehearsal he would insist that his players say their lines in the past tense, or even in the third person. As he explains, 'Using the third person allows the actor to adopt the right attitude of detachment'. In our own rehearsals, we did something similar in that we spoke our lines in each of our respective languages, resulting in a colourful mix of English, French, Italian, West African, and of course some German. This helped each actor see more clearly what he or she were saying. Acting in a foreign language is a distanciation in itself - already the words are fremd. On the subject of language, we again brought the needs of the audience to mind, acknowledging that a proportion of them would not speak German, or at least not have German as their main language. We knew then that the visuals would need an amount of exaggeration of expression, coming back to what I was explaining earlier, in order to tell the story more clearly. People would need to know that soldiers were soldiers and peasants were peasants from how they looked, and this went for costume as well as expression. All the soldiers wore baseball caps and sunglasses and marched about everywhere. We tried to have aristocrats to look deliberately glamorous. My character Azdak looked deliberately motley in his scruffy shirt and brown judges' robe, that set him apart from the others. Incidentally he was the only character to abstain from wearing the customary black-only - Azdak's shirt was purple, in indication of the high position he was to attain. The very nature of a character such as he produces a type of distanciation. His speech switches from the crude vernacular to the parable, which I felt showed him as part of Tscheidse's own words, part of a story, not real life. His own story, too, is a Verfremdung. The scruffy lowly drunken clerk who by chance becomes High Judge, who although willing to accept bribes from the rich - forcing the audience to believe that he'll naturally go on their side, as is what would be expected of this situation - yet allows the poor to still see justice and go free - surely the Marxist ideal of taxing the rich who put you where you are and still treating everyone as equals. This very anachronism makes the audience notice that this is out of the ordinary, and question themselves why they should think like this. Such Robin Hood figures are not the norm in real life - here we are made to ask why.
The stage design too allowed for detachment. Using an overhead projector I blasted cartoon images I had drawn onto the stage wall, including the titles of each act, and many mobile characters. I tried to merely suggest a farmhouse, or a city, or a glacier. I used several pictures of real Georgian architecture as sources for the illustrations, as I wanted to suggest the particular place, but I wanted this again to be 'quotation marks', not drawings of real scenes, just reported by the narrator.
I would like to conclude that not only is this style of acting very useful for Brecht's Verfremdung theories, but should also be kept in mind when staging any production as a whole, as it has become a principle area of theatre in the twentieth century. However, one must allow the theatre to live and not fall into the trap of performing 'Brecht in quotation marks' - remaining true word for word to the great master's original. Oscar Wilde may have responded when asked to make alterations to one of his own plays, 'Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?', but I doubt Brecht would have agreed. The most successful scene in our own production was the one where Azdak became the judge - the scene that Thomas rewrote from scratch, in which he simply told the story to the audience and I played out every character behind him, using lines from the text to suggest the story. That is what I believe can be achieved when one truly looks at a story and asks how it can be retold again, 'quoting' Brecht's meaning, but in the director's own way.
Pete W. Scully
e-mail: ml7005@qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College
April/May 1999