Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht a German playwright, poet and theatre director (1898-1956), one of the most influential figures of the modern theatre, who developed the theory and practice of epic theatre and sought to use drama as an instrument of social criticism and political change. His works, including The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, are performed throughout the world.

Early Life and First Works

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, in February 1898, the son of a factory manager, and he studied medicine at Munich before being drafted as a medical orderly in the First World War. The experience of the war made him a lifelong opponent of militarism and a critic of the society that had produced it. He began writing poems and plays as a student.

His early plays, Baal and Drums in the Night, made his name in the turbulent theatre of the Weimar Republic. In the Jungle of Cities and the play Edward II, adapted from Marlowe, showed his fascination with violence, contradiction and the struggle of the individual against a hostile world. These works were expressionistic in style and already carried the mark of his restless intelligence.

In 1922 he won the Kleist Prize, and he became a director and dramaturg in Munich and then in Berlin. In 1928 The Threepenny Opera, written with the composer Kurt Weill, became an international success and one of the defining works of the age. Its ballads and its cynical portrait of beggars and thieves in a capitalist city made it the most famous musical play of the twentieth century.

Epic Theatre and Theory

Brecht's central contribution to the theatre was the theory of epic theatre, developed in the late 1920s and 1930s. Against the dramatic theatre that seeks to involve the audience emotionally and to draw it into the illusion of the stage, epic theatre aims to make the audience think. It presents its events as a demonstration to be examined rather than a story to be believed.

The key concept is the alienation effect, or distancing effect, a set of techniques designed to prevent the spectator from identifying too closely with the characters. Actors are encouraged to present their roles rather than to become them, and the stage uses placards, direct address, visible lighting and music as commentary. These devices are meant to make the familiar appear strange and so open the way to critical understanding.

Brecht held that the theatre should be useful as well as pleasurable, and that it should address the great social questions of the day. His theoretical writings, gathered in works such as the Messingkauf Dialogues and the Short Organum for the Theatre, set out a programme for a theatre of reason and social change, and they have influenced directors and dramatists far beyond the political causes he espoused.

Exile and the Great Plays

With the rise of the Nazi party Brecht, a communist and a declared enemy of the regime, left Germany in 1933. He spent the following years in exile, in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and finally the United States, writing the plays on which his reputation chiefly rests. His books were burned by the Nazis, and he became, with other exiled writers, a voice of the opposition.

During these years he produced Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), a chronicle of the Thirty Years War in which a canteen woman follows the armies and loses her children one by one; The Life of Galileo, on the conflict between knowledge and authority; and The Good Person of Szechwan, a parable of goodness in a world that punishes it. These works combine history, parable and song in a manner that is at once intellectually demanding and theatrically powerful.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle and the anti-war play Fear and Misery of the Third Reich belong to the same period. In 1947 he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, and though he was not charged, he left the United States the following day. He settled in East Berlin in 1949, where he founded the Berliner Ensemble with his wife, the actress Helene Weigel.

Practice and the Berliner Ensemble

The Berliner Ensemble gave Brecht the means to realise his ideas in performance. With a permanent company, a theatre of his own and the resources of a state-supported institution, he was able to develop and revise his productions over long periods, and the company became the most admired in Europe. Its tours spread his methods and his plays throughout the world.

His practical work as a director was as important as his theory. He insisted on clarity of narrative, on the social meaning of every gesture, and on the integration of music, design and acting into a single theatrical conception. His productions of Mother Courage and of The Caucasian Chalk Circle were studied by theatre artists everywhere, and his influence on staging and design has been lasting.

He wrote plays and lyrics throughout his life, and his poems, many of them collected in the Svendborg Poems, are among the finest political poetry of the century. His language is direct, spare and memorable, and it carries the same desire to instruct and to move that animates his theatre.

Influence and Legacy

Brecht's influence on the modern theatre is difficult to exaggerate. The ideas of epic theatre and the alienation effect reshaped the way directors and playwrights think about the relationship between stage and audience, and his methods were taken up by the political theatre of the 1960s and after. The Berliner Ensemble remains a model of the ensemble company and of the director's theatre.

His plays are performed in every theatrical culture and are studied as classics of modern drama. Mother Courage and The Threepenny Opera, Galileo and The Caucasian Chalk Circle belong to the permanent repertoire, and his theoretical writings are taught wherever the theatre is studied. He was also one of the great librettists and lyric poets of his time.

He died in East Berlin in August 1956 and is buried there. His reputation has survived both the political controversies of his life and the changing fashions of the stage, and he is now recognised as one of the handful of figures who have shaped the modern theatre. He is remembered as the theorist and practitioner of a theatre that sought to make the world intelligible and to change it.

See also

• Epic theatre
• Alienation effect
• The Threepenny Opera
• Berliner Ensemble