Epic Theatre:A Theatre for the Scientific Age

The most common term used to characterize Brechts dramatic theory and practice is epic theatre, one that Brecht himself defined and promoted from the late 1920s. In subsequent years he attempted to vary and refine this description, partly because of the broad generalizations it engendered, partly because of shifts in his own attitudes to theatre. Dialectical and scientific were adjectives he introduced from about 1938 to adumbrate his modified and more sophisticated theatrical practice from then on. Yet epic does adequately embrace the major premises of Brechts theatre. This seeks, through careful choice of theme and normal structural means, to inculcate in the audience the detached, distancing attitude of the historian towards the events portrayed. The intention of epic theatre is thus not only to present a situation but to surprise the audience into a fresh and critical appreciation of the causes and processes underlying what is enacted.Epic is, of course, a generic label for a model of literature that has always been contrasted, for convenience, to the lyric and dramatic forms. Though it is manifestly impossible to say that a piece of writing must be purely lyrical or narrative or dramaticthere are many celebrated works that mingle the genresit is helpful to bear in mind the dominant characteristics of a genre that particularly reflect the perspective of the author and influence the formal structure of what he writes. Thus the lyrical mode is subjective, focusing on the poets personal feelings and reactions to external reality. The dramatic aims at the enactment of incidents and events between individuals, generally structured to involve aconflict and its solution. The author is excluded in so far as the action is cast totally in dialogue between the characters. The epic mode is regarded as the most objective; the author excludes himself from the work but is present in the form of a narrator who conveys events through description and comment. The tense of the epic tends to be past, its span often of considerable length, both in narrated and narrative time. From theGesta Romanorumand the medieval lays to the modern novel the epic has appeared to be the most objective literary representation of external reality positing, as it does, an author and audience in a detached, observing relationship to the events and characters portrayed. Dictionary definitions tend to emphasize the narrative aspect with its concomitant distance from the action. In common parlance, too, the use of the epithet epic implies a large-scale, panoramic span of events often covering a persons life or even several generations; essential to this is the vantage-point of the spectator standing outside the action and able to see it in its totality.The formal aspects of epic detachment and narration are, however, only starting-points for the fundamental changes Brecht and others wished to achieve in the drama. He recognized and appreciated the tradition of epic narration in a dramatic context, from Shakespeare to crude fairground presentations of historical personages and their deeds. But these were still only a matter of technique, not of deliberate and systematic intention; that is to say, representation - not illuminationwas still the aim. In 1938 Brecht wrote as the opening sentence to his important essay.In the decade and a half that followed the World War a comparatively new way of acting was tried out in a number of German theatres. Its qualities of clear description and reporting and its use of choruses and projections as a means of commentary earned it the name epic (JW adapted)It is true that Brecht consistently acknowledged the immense debt of the epic theatre to the pioneering work of the Naturalist movement a generation earlier, particularly in making social and political questions the explicit theme of literature. The impetus derived from the new topics of the great French bourgeois novelists began to penetrate the stage. Nevertheless, Naturalism never went beyond a surface realism and simply replaced fate by heredity and environment.(A crude and superficial realism which never revealed the deeper connections... The environment was regarded as a part of nature. Unchangeable and inescapable.)The systematic experimentation in the 1920s aimed at a coherent use of theatre as a social art and to that end the epic drama was most actively promoted in Erwin Piscators political theatre. Brecht almost certainly had Piscators productions in mind when he wrote the opening sentence ofThe Street-Scene,but although he often praised them he never perhaps sufficiently indicated how they pioneered many elements of his own drama. The reason for this may indeed lie in the fact that Piscator was solely a producer, while Brecht, as a dramatist, viewed theatrical presentation more as the creator of imaginary persons and situations. Piscators concept of political drama was clear and forcefully formulated and practised: the task of the theatre was to intervene actively in contemporary events by instructing and altering the audience. He saw three stages in this process of opening the spectators eyes - knowledge, understanding, conviction - and, like Brecht, he sought fresh formal means of dramatic presentation to achieve this goal. The aim of exposing objectively the workings of society, the desire to alter the spectators consciousness, and shared political convictions made for close parallels between Piscators political and Brechts epic theatre.Brechts first and best-known contribution to a systematic theory of epic theatre appeared in 1930 in his notes to the operaRise and Fall of the City ofMahagonny.This was the culmination of his prolonged polemic against the established theatre that, in his opinion, was solely interested in selling superficial, mindless entertainment and side-stepped the serious concerns of the day. He called this theatre culinary, as it was no more mentally stimulating than was the eating of food. At this stage, and unlike Piscator who identified the function of epic theatre in a more aggressively political manner, Brecht concentrated on differentiating between the modern epic theatre and the dramatic theatre he wanted it to oust. Thus, in his famous tabulation in theMahagonnynotes he compiled a list of contrasts between Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian forms of drama that, despite his cautionary footnote that these were not mutually exclusive characteristics but rather shifts of accent, was taken to be the assertion of a new dramatic dogma. In 1983 Brecht had to revise his tabulation because of possible misunderstandings, toning down the starkness of his initial formulation but with no radical alteration. If one remembers Brechts caution that he was not promulgating total rejection of the dramatic theatre, these notes do offer a lucid outline of the tendency in epic theatre towards on open form that differed in a marked degree from the closed structure of traditional classical theatre. The contrasts relate to three main areas: the hero or human being as the subject of drama, the structure of the play, and the spectator. With unerring theatrical instinct Brecht unconsciously identified the crucial aspects of a drama (theme, presentation, reception) and centred his proposed changes on these. The principle that linked all three aspects into a coherent whole was the idea ofprocess,that nothing is determined, absolute and fixed, but subject to influence and change. Thus Brecht attacked the prevailing conception that the hero (and all human beings) possess innate characteristics that cannot be altered by circumstances, a nature that determines his behaviour ineluctably. The consequent irresolvable conflict between the fixed hero and the world, which is the stuff of classical drama, was rejected by Brecht as inappropriate and unrealistic; in its place he posited a hero subject to alteration and development, adapting to society, but also by his actions changing society.Brecht castigated the established bourgeois theatre in the 1920s for encouraging the spectator to leave his reasoning powers with his hat and coat in the cloak-room and enter the darkened auditorium simply to engage in a trance-like orgy of feeling, as if he were drugged. Brecht had far more active designs on the spectator: he wanted him to use his critical faculties in assessing what was being enacted, and gain insights from this process that would influence his own further thinking, that is, alter his consciousness. Thus Brecht sought in the first instance to inculcate in the spectator the attitude of the observing historian who, however excited he may be by them, can stand back from the passions of personalities, register events and evidence, and come to a reasoned conclusion about a situation. But he also viewed the spectator as a person to be influenced and changed, so that the educative, instructive thrust of epic theatre, which was deliberately designed to convey an understanding of the causes underlying what was depicted, opened into a wider perspective than the play itself and aimed at arousing the spectators capacity for action or,, in other words, altering his consciousness.By the time Brecht came to revise his table of contrasts he no longer needed to define his type of drama by setting it against the Aristotelian model.In that same year he set out his view of the essentials of epic theatre. Whereas earlier it could be inferred that the epic theatre was clearly best suited to dealing with social and political problems, public matters, Brecht now went further, unequivocally defining its function and purpose entirely in a political context:Supporters of this epic theatre argued that the new subject-matter, the highly involved incidents of the class war in its acutest and most terrible stage, would be mastered more easily by such a method, since it would thereby become possible to portray social processes in their causal relationships (JW adapted)... an incident such as can be seen at any street corner, an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place. The bystanders may not have observed what happened, or they may simply not agree with him, may see things a different way; the point is that the demonstrator acts the behaviour of driver or victim or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident. (JW)One of the key elements of epic theatre that was to become indissolubly associated with Brechts theatre and a commonplace of twentieth-century drama in general, the alienation effect, was first described in 1935 in Brechts essay,Alienation effects in Chinese acting,although it had been part and parcel of his practice from much earlier (e.g. in the prologue and epilogue spoken by the actors in(The Exception and the Rule),(1929). InThe Exception and The Ruleit is given one of many later formulations, as(a technique of taking the human social incidents to be portrayed and labelling them as something striking, something that calls for explanation, and is not to be taken for granted, not just natural. The object of this effect is to allow the spectator to criticize constructively from a social point of view.)(JW adapted)As a technique the alienation effect can be easily identified, especially in Brechts later plays, for it emerges in the major areas of the theatrical experience: in the plays structure, the disposition and contrasting of scenes and episodes; in the language, the conflict of dialogue and the contradictions highlighted between the speech and actions of the characters: in the actors effort to play at being and to stand outside a character; and in the handling of sister arts such as music, lighting and scenic design in a stage production. But the alienation effect in Brechts theatre is not confined to formal techniques, a vehicle for the authors message, it is simultaneously the content itself, namely the matter the author is structuring and his perspective on it. The social content that operates in the same way as the technique of alienation is theGestus,a term Brecht devised to denote the essential theme of an incident, a scene, a whole play. Later, in(Short Organum),Brecht indicated how theGestusarises from the interaction of people, their attitudes and behaviour towards each other. The integration of content with the formal means of presenting it is the distinguishing feature of the alienation technique in Brechts works.Brechts intensive study of Marxs dialectical materialism in 1926 bore fruit for his drama in the classic Marxist categories deployed inDie heilige Johanna der Schlachthofe (St. Joan of the Stock-yards)(1929-30). These didactic learning plays were an experiment in articulating social and political issues in a simple, lucid but schematic form for the benefit of the performers, not for an audience. Brecht was clearly aware that epic theatre had come to be associated almost exclusively with formal aspects, focusing particularly on structural differences from traditional plays. His concern was to re-establish the significance of contradiction and dialectics in the content as well as the external mechanics of drama. Dialectics shifts the centre of gravity back to the ideas of society (political, economic, sociological) that see society as an organic process of mens living together in continual flux and change. Hence the less dogmatic, more flexible and ambiguous structures of the plays Brecht wrote after he leftGermanycompared with the relatively rigid illustrations of Marxist theory he favoured in the lateWeimarRepublic.A further designation that Brecht used increasingly was theatre of a scientific age, though he felt that this, too, was not broad enough and perhaps already contaminated by the problem of the social and moral responsibility of science. In the prologue to theOrganonBrecht calls for scientifically exact representations of human society in the theatre and several times later refers to contemporary men as the children of a scientific age, for our life has come to be determined by the sciences to a new and formidable extent.Undoubtedly Brecht strove to induce in the spectator a detached, observant approach to the depiction on stage, but it was only objective in that it depended as much on the spectators reasoning faculties as his emotions. A major intention of theOrganonis to indicate ways in which Brechts scientific theatre can be harnessed to change the consciousness of the audience and hence facilitate the altering of the reality that is reflected on the stage.The keynote of this scientific theatre is then change. Whereas the theatre as we know it shows the structure of society depicted on stage as incapable of being influenced by society (in the auditorium), Brecht calls for a type of theatre that generates new thoughts and feelings in the spectator and leaves him productively disposed, even after the spectacle is over. The uncertainty principle that would have a deleterious, distorting effect in scientific observation is positively striven for as an active corrective in Brechts theatre - the desired aim is that the audienceshouldintervene in the processes of society and should itself change its own thinking. The renowned detachment of the spectator in epic theatre has in the first instance the quality of the historians critical view of events: he re-enacts them through description and indicates their relevance and significance through comment. This bifocal perspective is retained by Brecht through the manipulation of his material by means of alienation techniques; but while the insight into society is being mediated, the emancipatory dimension simultaneously comes into play and the audience is encouraged to adopt an actively critical stance towards the representation on stage. The audience is put into a position to see more than the protagonists, to grasp the wider context, to assess the evidence presented and adopt an attitude as to its significance. The spectator is thus not regarded as just the passive recipient of a description of circumstances, however naturalistic, but as an active and integral component of the total process of a play.Brechts later plays have little to do with historical authenticity and nothing whatever with naturalism. Indeed, his dominant preoccupations became the parable form and realism which, paradoxically, are intimately connected. In a revealing work-diary entry of 30 March 1947 Brecht went to the lengths of setting out in tabular form - as he had done for epic and dramatic-some contrasts between naturalism and realism, the former being merely a surrogate realism(Aj 780).Some of these distinctions illuminate Brechts dramatic thinking and methods. His predilection for the parable, for instance, facilitated the stylization of reality and gave him the freedom to devise models of society that, unhampered by historical facts, could be structured at will to incorporate the didactic message with maximum impact. While the parable lacked the force of actual historical concreteness. Brecht was well aware that it had a vicarious authenticity that accommodates the authors intent, namely a clarification of the system.Time after time Brecht defined realism as a productive, scientifically analytical attitude towards reality rather than a recognizable imitation of the world, and he formulated specific guidelines for realistic art. The most popular Brecht plays in East German theatres since 1945 have beenDie Gewehre der Frau Carrar (Senora Carrars Rifles), Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera)andHerr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (Herr Puntila and his Servant Matti),all with considerable entertainment value and none an obvious model of scientific theatre. It is indisputable, however, that at the theoretical and exemplary level at least Brecht has powerfully influenced drama wherever it is socially and politically conscious, as the widespread currency of the epithet Brechtian testifies.