How Plays Work by David Edgar

Author:David Edgar [Edgar, David]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780010458
Publisher: Nick Hern

Epic theatre

As we’ve seen, the plays of Ibsen’s mature period strive above all else for a dramatic seamlessness which allows the creation of a highly concentrated emotional intensity, deceiving the audience into thinking that the action they are witnessing is inevitable, and there is no authorial decision-making going on at all. Brecht’s dramatic technique is precisely the reverse. As he put it in ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’, the audience shouldn’t ‘fling itself into the story as if it was a river and let itself be carried vaguely hither and thither’; the individual scenes of a play must ‘be knotted together in such a way that the knots are easily noticed’, so that the audience can interpose its judgement.1 While Ibsen strives to make the scenes seem part of the same gathering movement, the Brecht scene strives to be as distinct as possible from those which follow and precede it, to operate like a little play in and of itself. Far from thinking that Scene 3 is the inevitable consequence of Scene 2, Brecht wants us to ask why he’s moved us from Venice to Florence, or from a Swedish roadside to a Polish encampment.

The advantage of Brecht’s epic theatre lies in its very present-tenseness: there is little need for exposition, we see everything we need to know. The disadvantage is not just that plays with lots of little scenes are harder to engage with, as each new scene requires a new environment to get used to, and often (in Brecht’s case) a new group of people to meet; it’s also that, by making his choices so visible, the playwright elbows himself in between us and the action, preventing us from identifying wholeheartedly with what’s going on. Of course, that’s exactly what Brecht wanted to do.

Rightly or wrongly, standing like a border guard between the audience and the action is no longer a fashionable playwriterly approach. How strange, therefore, that the most interesting developments in structure of the last hundred years have sought to make the playwright even more visible.

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