The Literary Theory Toolkit by Rapaport Herman

Author:Rapaport, Herman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

4.5 Epic Theatre

Realist theatre, with its emphasis upon “total acting,” was anathema to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht who developed the antagonistic concept of epic theatre in the 1920s and 1930s. According to Brecht, the illusionism of realist theatre was ideologically suspect because its purpose was to anesthetize the bourgeoisie to social tragedy by turning it into entertainment. Problematic, too, was that realism reinforced complicity with the status quo, even when the status quo was unacceptable. Passive viewing, which was linked to the assumption that “the way things are” can’t be changed, ensured social/political inaction on the part of that segment of society that actually had the power to bring change about.

Epic theatre breaks with the illusionism of realist theatre. Where there is music, it sounds amateurish and bad; where there is dialogue, it doesn’t quite convince; the characters are relatively crude, which makes identification with them unlikely; the sets are makeshift environments that are flimsy, and they deny us the fantasy of a self-enclosed world whose fourth wall is missing. The actors, at various times, will speak of themselves in the third person and will read stage directions in order to break the illusion of theatre. Nothing is to be acted as if the content were “a given.” Alternatives to what is said are always supposed to be inferred. Furthermore, epic theatre does not offer a satisfying catharsis, for epic theatre is not supposed to be “resolved.”

Whereas in Shakespeare the diversity of speeches coming from various different social ranks would be synthesized – as in, say, within the character of Hamlet or Lear – in Brecht dialogue is not homogenized. The Brechtian audience therefore is in the role of mediating the dialogue in a rather self-conscious and critical manner, as opposed to passively taking in what characters on stage have processed for the audience. When, at the end of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, a friend of the family says that no one ought to blame Willy Loman for killing himself in order that his wife get the life insurance, that character is psychologically “containing” the tragedy and explaining its moral significance to the audience. In Brechtian epic theatre, however, no character would be allowed to serve such a function, at least, not unironically, because the purpose of epic theatre is to deny the audience synthesis and the emotional comfort and character identification that synthesis makes possible. Also, Brecht doesn’t want the dialogue or the characters that speak to resolve issues in such a way that after the play is over, one can forget it and move on. Brecht refuses synthesis in terms of creating stage props that make us realize we’re seeing a performance, not a ready-made reality. He shifts the scenes around in different ways for different performances, and encourages the delivery of lines that make one realize there is a disjunction between what is said and the person who is speaking. In such a manner, the audience undergoes an “alienation effect” (the term is Brecht’s).

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