A London underworld of beggars and thieves, a wedding held in a stable, and a street ballad about a shark's teeth (1928)
The Threepenny Opera, with Kurt Weill — a reworking of Gay's Beggar's Opera; its opening song became 'Mack the Knife'.
Literature · Playwrights
Bertolt Brecht
1898–1956 · German
Epic theatre; the alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt)
Bertolt Brecht was a German playwright, poet and director whose theory of 'epic theatre' reshaped twentieth-century drama. He wanted audiences to think rather than weep, and used songs, placards, harsh visible lighting and direct address to break the illusion — the technique he called Verfremdungseffekt, the alienation or distancing effect. A committed Marxist, he spent fifteen years in exile from the Nazis before returning to East Berlin to found the Berliner Ensemble.
How to spot them
- ▸'Epic theatre': the audience must never be allowed to forget it is sitting in a theatre
- ▸Songs that stop the action, captions, exposed lights, actors announcing what will happen next
- ▸Collaborations with the composers Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler
- ▸Exile from 1933 to 1947, then the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin with his wife Helene Weigel
- ▸The Lehrstücke, didactic 'teaching plays' written for the performers rather than for spectators
Key works
A canteen woman hauls her wagon behind the armies of a seventeenth-century religious war and loses all three of her children to it (1939)
Mother Courage and Her Children — written in Scandinavian exile, premiered in Zurich in 1941.
An astronomer recants before the Inquisition, and his pupil cries that unhappy is the land that has no heroes (1943)
Life of Galileo — endlessly revised; the American version was made with Charles Laughton.
Three gods reward a poor Chinese prostitute, who can only survive by inventing a ruthless male cousin (1943)
The Good Person of Szechwan — the parable of whether goodness is possible in an unjust world.
A servant girl saves an abandoned baby during a coup, and a drunken village scribe settles the custody with a ring of chalk (1948)
The Caucasian Chalk Circle — the judge is Azdak; the child goes to the woman who will not pull.
Twenty-four short scenes of ordinary Germans under the Nazis, from the butcher's shop queue to the SS cell (1938)
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich — his most directly documentary work.
A soldier returns from the war to find his fiancée pregnant by a profiteer, and walks away from the revolution; it won its twenty-four-year-old author the Kleist Prize (1922)
Drums in the Night — the early Munich play that made his name.
A teaching play in which a young comrade is killed by his own party for a compassion that endangers the cause (1930)
The Decision (Die Massnahme) — the most notorious of the Lehrstücke.
Key ideas
- Verfremdungseffekt: making the familiar strange so the audience judges instead of identifying
- Epic against 'dramatic' theatre — narrative and argument rather than empathy and catharsis
- 'Gestus': the single social gesture that shows a character's place in the world
- Theatre as an instrument of political change rather than of consolation
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Augsburg, Bavaria, on 10 February 1898; served briefly as a medical orderly in the First World War
- •Won the Kleist Prize in 1922 for Drums in the Night
- •Left Germany the day after the Reichstag fire in 1933; exile in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and the United States
- •Testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947 and left America the next day
- •Founded the Berliner Ensemble in 1949 with his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, who played Mother Courage
- •His theoretical writings are collected in 'Brecht on Theatre', edited and translated by John Willett
- •A major poet as well: the Hauspostille and the exile poems, including 'To Those Born After'
- •Died in East Berlin on 14 August 1956 and is buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery, close to Hegel's grave
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Sources
- Stephen Parker — Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life
- John Willett (editor and translator) — Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic