bertolt brecht and epic theatre

Bertolt brecht (February 1898 – August 1956)



Brecht  was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director who influenced  theatre style by becoming  one of the most recognisable practitioners of his century.  

Brecht who discovered and developed the  theory and practice of his 'epic theatre',  was said to analyse and follow the likes of  Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a  form that emphasizes the social/political content of drama, rather than its emotional manipulation of the audience, a style and “image”   that had been around for generations .

Brecht's concerns with modernist  drama  led to his creation  of the 'epic form' of the drama. This dramatic form is related to similar modern innovations in other  parts of the industry , including t

·         the strategy of divergent chapters in James Joyce's novel Ulysses

·         Sergei Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema

·          Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts.

 However  Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution and its styles such as naturalism but  he hoped he could instead 're-function' the theatre to a new social use. Brechts theatre created popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create psychological and socialist varieties.

brechts works

• • Drums in the Night (1922)
  • Baal (1923)
  • In the Jungle of the Cities (1923)
  • Edward II (1924)
  • The Elephant Calf (1925)
  • Man Equals Man (1926)
  • The Threepenny Opera (1928)
  • Happy End (1929)
  • Lindbergh's Flight (1929)
  • He Who Says Yes (1929)
  • Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930)
  • He Who Says No (1930)
  • The Measures Taken (1930)
  • The Mother (1932)
  • The Seven Deadly Sins (1933)
  • The Roundheads and the Peakheads (1936)
  • The Exception and the Rule (1936)
  • Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1938)
  • Señora Carrara's Rifles (1937)
  • The Trial of Lucullus (1939)
  • Mother Courage and Her Children (1941)
  • Mr Puntila and His Man Matti (1941)
  • Life of Galileo (1943)
  • The Good Person of Sezuan (1943)
  • Schweik in the Second World War (1944)
  • The Visions of Simone Machard (1944)
  • The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945)
  • The Days of the Commune (1949)
  • The Tutor (1950)
  • The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1958)
  • Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1959)

People who have followed  Brechtian legacy withn theatre  include:

·         Dario Fo

·         Augusto Boal,

·         Joan Littlewood,

·         Peter Brook

·          Peter Weiss,

·         Heiner Müller,

·         Pina Bausch

·         Tony Kushner

·          Robert Bolt

·         Caryl Churchill.

Brecht also influenced film writers and TV writers these include:

·         Jean-Luc Godard

·          Lindsay Anderson

·         Rainer Werner Fassbinder

·         Joseph Losey

·          Nagisa Oshima,

·         Ritwik Ghatak

 epic theare



Epic theatre  was a theatrical movement  in the 20th century from a number of theatre practitioners, including Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and, most famously, Bertolt Brecht.  However  Brechtian epic theatre had been around for years as Brecht continuously developed the style, and popularized it. Epic theatre incorporates a style acting what bertolt brecht called “gestus” .

Gestus is an acting technique. Its a simple combination of physical gesture and attitude. A Gestus should reveal a specific aspect of a character: rather than his “casual” physicality and  psychological thought process.  A Gestus makes a character's social relations clear through his  behaviour to create  his/her  historical materialist perspective.

Brecht had many definitions to gestus such as....

"An attitude or single aspect of an attitude"   "Expressible in words or actions” “Embodiment of an attitude”

“The uncovering or revealing of the motivations and transactions that underpin a dramatic exchange between the characters and the "epic" narration of that character by the actor (whether explicitly or implicitly”.

Bertolt Brecht

"Every emotion" when treated under the rubric of Gestus, manifests itself as a set of social relations, For it is what happens between people, Brecht insists, that provides them with all the material that they can discuss, criticize, alter” Elizabeth Wright

What should the actor do?

Acting in epic theatre requires actors to play characters believably without convincing either the audience or themselves that they have "become" the characters. Actors in brechts productions often communicate with the audience directly out of character ("breaking the fourth wall") and play multiple roles. Brecht thought it was important that the choices the characters made were explicit, and tried to develop a style of acting wherein it was obvious that the characters were choosing one action over another. For example, a character could say, "I could have stayed at home, but instead I went to the shops." This he called "fixing the Not / But element the actor's attitude should be used as epic narration “the 'showing' that is 'shown' in the 'showing', in Brecht's turn of phrase” Brecht