Brecht

Brecht was a playwrite who was active from the 30’s to the 50’s, he was well known in Germany and was on one of Hitlers death lists due to the content and messages of his plays becuase it encouraged the audience to think about what was really happening around them. Brecht wanted to change the world by using theatre and wanted his audience to watch a play and want to them go on to do something, possibly political, about what they had seen rather than develop and emotional attachment to a character and their story, this doesn’t mean that Brecht didn’t want emotion at all which can be a misconception about his style becuase he did want emotion but he wanted it to be about something political. One of his early ideas was to perform “learning plays” where he would try and teach people about political issues which was a good idea in practice but when it came to performing them they were found to be boring so he introduced 2 different techniques in his performances to engage his audience: Spass and the Vertfrumdung effect.

Spass means fun, one of Brechts ideas was that theatre should be fun and so if you have laughed at something you have already decided that it is funny and he aimed for all his plays to have comedy in them becuase while you are laughing you are also thinking. Spass was also an excellent way to break any tension which was key in his work to stop the audience following a characters emotional journey and then leading them to become attached to this character. Brecht had different techniques he used to distance the audience and one of the comedic ones he used was the use of a song or a comedic routine as they are so out of place in the stories he is telling yet it is still effective at conveying a serious subject and message. The Vertfrumdung effect makes you tilt your perspective of what you’re looking at to make you see it in a different light, the actor will have no fourth wall to make the audience feel included in what’s going on rather than them just being a spectator, this can be achieved by directly addressing the audience. Brecht also used epic theatre, a technique that has a narrative that starts and ends leaving issues unresolved leaving the audience with questions about what they would do which helped with the distancing idea.