Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance

✍ Scribed by David Barnett; Enoch Brater; Mark Taylor-Batty

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 257
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Bertolt Brecht’s reputation as a flawed, irrelevant or difficult thinker for the theatre can often go before him to such an extent that we run the risk of forgetting the achievements that made him and his company, the Berliner Ensemble, famous around the world.
David Barnett examines both Brecht the theorist and Brecht the practitioner to reveal the complementary relationship between the two.This book aims to sensitize the reader to the approaches Brecht took to the world and the stage with a view to revealing just how carefully he thought about and realized his vision of a politicized, interventionist theatre. What emerges is a nuanced understanding of his concepts, his work with actors and his approaches to directing. The reader is encouraged to engage with Brecht’s method that sought to ‘make theatre politically’ in order to locate the innovations he introduced into his stagecraft. There are many examples given of how Brecht’s ideas can be staged, and the final chapter takes two very different plays and asks how a Brechtian approach can enliven and illuminate their production. Ultimately, the book invites readers, students and theatre-makers to discover new ways of apprehending and making use of Brecht.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
(Re)Introducing Brecht
Format and scope
1 Revealing the Radical Theorist
Brecht as theorizing practitioner
The different functions of theory to Brecht
Theorizing as a private and public activity
Understanding the assumptions of the ‘Short Organon’, or: An introduction to dialectics
The appeal of dialectics to Brecht
What is Brecht teaching?
Defining ‘the Brechtian’
Making theatre politically
The radicalism of the ‘Short Organon’
2 Buying Brass as Performative Thinking
Theorizing with more than one voice
The possibilities of performing theory
A Brechtian performance of Buying Brass
Not only dialogues: Buying Brass’s scenes for actors
Montage, or: Structured disruption in the episodic form of Buying Brass
3 Brecht and Difference
The centrality of change and its relationship to difference in Brecht’s theatre
Forgetting ‘character’
How to build a contradictory ‘figure’
The dangers of empathy in theatrical communication
Interrupting empathy in Brecht’s theatre
Separating the elements of the performance and the meaning of ‘epic theatre’
Historicization and/as Verfremdung
Theatre as a site of contradiction, not merely conflict
4 Method Trumps Styles
The Brechtian method: Greater than the sum of its parts
The centrality of the Fabel
Arrangement as the Fabel made flesh
Locating the actor in society: The discovery of a figure’s Gestus
A figure is the sum of all its Haltungen
Brecht’s theatre of showing
Realism and Brecht’s dialectical method
5 Brecht and the Actor
There is no ‘Brechtian Style’ of acting
Brecht and casting, or: Cleaving the actor from the role
Observation, realism and Gestus
Sensitizing the actor to dialectics
The actor-as-demonstrator in theory and practice
Playing the situation and not the character, or: The problem of saying ‘I’
The pursuit of naturalness and lightness in a stylized theatre
Acting and emotion
6 Brecht and the Director
Inductive direction, or: The ‘invisibility’ of the Brechtian director
The tasks of the Brechtian director
The prerequisite for a Brechtian director: A vibrant ensemble
Rehearsing with an inductive director
Abolishing the read-through, or: The status of the text in rehearsal
The rehearsal process and its social goals
Connecting the individual to society: Details, customs and monologues
Bringing out the social in performance: Focus on The Broken Jug
7 Brecht, Documentation and the Art of Copying
Imitation and innovation
The building blocks of documentation at the Berliner Ensemble: Notate
Demystifying the theatrical process: ‘Modelbooks’
Making use of the ‘models’
Copying as productive activity
8 Using Brecht’s Method
Applicability and approach
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: Identifying the problems of a potential production
Relativizing the centrality of Arturo Ui
Avoiding the ‘allegory trap’
Making Ui’s rise ‘resistible’
Closer: Why Brecht?
The social contexts of 1990s Britain
Investigating the ‘Micro-Fabel’
Extending the reach
Epilogue
Working with Brecht
Working with Brecht beyond Brecht
Notes
Bibliography (including list of abbreviations)
Works by Brecht
Other Works
Works by Brecht: List of Abbreviations
Index