Brect's Theory Of Theatre
Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the audience to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead cause the audience to self-reflect and have a critical view of the action on the stage, Brecht called the act of distancing the audience from emotional involvement the verfremdungseffekt
When naturalistic theatre was at its height and mirrored exactly what was happening in society, he decided to use it as a force for change. He wanted to make his audience think and famously said that theatre audiences at that time “hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”.
In naturalistic theatre the audience care about the lives of the characters onstage. They forget the problems they are facing in their own lives and escape into the lives of others. When an audience cries for a character or feels emotion through the events happening to them it’s called catharsis, Brecht was against this type of theatre.
He believed that while the audience believed in the action onstage and became emotionally involved they lost the ability to think and to judge the performance and issues raised. He wanted his audiences to remain objective and distant from emotional involvement so that they could make considered and rational judgement about any social comment or issues in his work.
Epic theatre (Brechtian theatre) breaks the fourth wall, the imaginary wall between the actors and audience which keeps them as observers. They are active members of the theatrical experience as they are kept thinking throughout, not switching off.
His Theory:
When naturalistic theatre was at its height and mirrored exactly what was happening in society, he decided to use it as a force for change. He wanted to make his audience think and famously said that theatre audiences at that time “hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”.
In naturalistic theatre the audience care about the lives of the characters onstage. They forget the problems they are facing in their own lives and escape into the lives of others. When an audience cries for a character or feels emotion through the events happening to them it’s called catharsis, Brecht was against this type of theatre.
He believed that while the audience believed in the action onstage and became emotionally involved they lost the ability to think and to judge the performance and issues raised. He wanted his audiences to remain objective and distant from emotional involvement so that they could make considered and rational judgement about any social comment or issues in his work.
Epic theatre (Brechtian theatre) breaks the fourth wall, the imaginary wall between the actors and audience which keeps them as observers. They are active members of the theatrical experience as they are kept thinking throughout, not switching off.
His Theory:
- Brecht loathed the theatre of realism
- he liked the realistic theatre a realistic performance pacified its audience
- Brecht’s plays were didactic and aimed to teach or instruct their audience
- Brecht used the term ‘Lehrstück’, meaning ‘learning-play’
- social activist theatre wanting the spectators to make change in their own world outside the theatre walls
- in 1926 Brecht embraced Marxism and his theatre techniques after this point served his Marxist beliefs
- Brecht’s umbrella title for a range of non-realistic techniques is ‘verfremdungseffekt’
- misleadingly translated over the decades as ‘distancing effect’
- recent and more accepted translation is ‘to make the familiar, strange’
- ‘epic’ borrowed from the great poems of literature (The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Mahabharata, Ramayana)
- Brecht was influenced by (German) expressionism and had an interest in the cabaret scene in Berlin
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