In today’s lesson we looked at films about Brecht and his
work. From these films we learnt more about him and his ways of working.
One of the films looked at his most famous play, that he
wrote “Mother Courage”, in this film it showed that it Brecht makes suggestions
about how theatre should be made and what he believed that acting should be. He
had to split the academic man inside him with the man of the theatre that
wanted to explore more that stay set to certain theories. He wanted the
audience to live in a double reality in believing in the things that they are
watching on stage but also knowing that it is artificial and a piece of
theatre, not real. He wanted to take unexpected things to shake things up in
theatre a bit. He said that he wanted to make the “familiar strange and the
strange familiar”.
He also wanted to make the stage visually exciting and by
doing this he striped back the stage so that all of the movement in changing
the stage and changing the set can be seen from the audiences view and what is
happening backstage. This helps to alienate the audience from the piece of
theatre as it is clear that it is theatre not real life. Brecht also used music
and lighting which has been carried on into our theatre that we see now as it
used heavily.
Another film that we watched was showing us the people who
actually were able to work alongside Brecht and to be able to tell us about him
and what it was like to be working with him.
Brecht’s plays were all created to challenge the audience
and rather than to simply entertain them, to actually make them think more.
They were to watch, to judged and then to be changed by the theatre. We were
told that Brecht never wanted to “throw away points” in the text as well.
Brecht concentrated a lot on the plotting and the staging of
the play, because he believe that it could tell the story and the audience
could start to make out the themes without using any of the dialogue. Brecht
was also very clear about how he wanted his spectators to watch the play and he
brought about a new theory of grammar and staging and the act of being
spectators of a new thing.
Brecht wanted to distance the emotion from the audience and
from the character of Mother Courage, this is why in the first performance of
“Mother Courage” in Germany he changed the play slightly, making it so that she
doesn’t learn anything from the play. This way the audience connect with her
less and they learn something even through she doesn’t.
In the early days of his writing, Brecht was focused on anarchism,
and he had very little view of history. However nearing the end of his life,
his writing became more influenced by Marxism and wanted to create change.
Brecht created a new company to put on his play that he
wrote, in the way the he wanted to do it. He believed in a democratic way of
creating theatre, so that he could explore everyone’s ideas and thoughts, he
wanted collective responsibility for the work created.
