Brecht’s Marxist political convictions led him to propose an alternative direction for the theatre that would fuse the two functions of instruction and entertainment. In this way the theatre could project a picture of the world by artistic means and offer models of life that could help the spectators to understand their social environment and to master it both rationally and emotionally. The main concept of Brecht’s program was that of Verfremdungseffekt (“alienation”). In order to induce a critical frame of mind in the spectator, Brecht considered it necessary to dispense with the empathetic involvement with the stage that the illusionary theatre sought to induce. Generally, this has been understood as a deadening coldness in the productions, but such an interpretation proceeds from a general ignorance of Brecht’s own writings on the subject. Rather, he insisted, as Appia, Craig, and the Symbolists did before him, that the audience must be reminded that it is watching a play.
Brecht’s ideas can be approached through the image presented by the theatre he chose to work in on his return to East Germany in 1947. The auditorium of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm is lavish to the point of fantasy, decorated with ornate plaster figures. The stage, by complete contrast, is a vast mechanized scenic space in which everything is clearly exposed to view as theatrical and man-made. In the contrast between the comfort of the auditorium and the science of the stage lies the condition of Brecht’s theatre. The audience was there to be entertained but also to think scientifically.
Many of the techniques of Brecht’s staging were developments of earlier work. The use of three-dimensional set pieces in a large volume of space clearly derived from Jessner. His delight in the use of machinery and in particular the revolving stage came from Piscator. The insistence on the actors’ demonstrating through the physical disposition of the body their gestus (“attitude”) toward what is happening derived from Meyerhold, though with Brecht the gestus was always socially based. The clearest of his alienation devices, the projection of captions preceding the scene so that the audience knows in advance what will happen and therefore can concentrate on how it happens, derived from Piscator’s jotter screens and film captions.
Brecht acknowledged in his work the need for the actor to undergo a process of identification with the part, and he paid tribute to Stanislavsky as the first person to produce a systematic account of the actor’s technique. Brecht required his actors to go beyond Stanislavsky and to incorporate a social attitude or judgment into their portrayal. Characterization without a critical judgment was in Brecht’s view seductive artifice; conversely, social judgment without the characterization of a rounded human being was arid dogmatism. The theatre of mixed styles and means that Meyerhold and others constructed to cope with the grotesque experience of modern living was transformed by Brecht into a political principle. He used mixed means and styles to expose the contradictions, inconsistencies, and dialectics of situations and characters. Brecht’s strongest theatrical effects were created through the juxtaposition of inconsistent attitudes in a character. Although the settings in Brecht’s productions were clearly theatrical, the costumes and properties were not. Great care was taken to make each property and its use authentic for the period or character. In Brecht’s theatre, if a chicken were to be plucked the actor did not mime or roughly approximate the action—the chicken was plucked. Costumes had to make clear the social class of the persons wearing them. This places Brecht directly in the line with the Meiningen Players, though again the gestus is particularly social rather than historical.
Brecht’s methods of rehearsal were especially innovative. The methods worked out in his own company, the Berliner Ensemble, established a directing collective well advanced beyond those of Reinhardt and Piscator. In Brecht’s theatre, the director, dramaturge, designer, and composer had equal authority in the production. The designer had a special function; in addition to designing the sets and costumes, he also produced, for early rehearsal purposes, a series of sketches of key moments in the action. The rehearsals became a process of testing hypotheses about the play and its production. What held the collective together and made the method workable was the story, or fable. All the elements of production were synthesized for telling this story in public. At some points the music conveyed the meaning, at other times the setting, or the actors, or the words did. Brecht often invited observers to the rehearsals in order to test the clarity of the story. The process of testing could continue into the performance period. When the company was satisfied that the staging was correct, the production was photographed and a Modellbuch was prepared with photographs set against the text to show the disposition of the stage at all times and to mark significant changes of position on the part of the actors. The Modellbuch was then available (in a more advanced form than the designer’s sketches) as the basis for any subsequent productions.
The Modellbuch has aroused resentment on the part of directors who prefer to respond freely to the text. Brecht’s intention was not to limit but to provide a document as scientific evidence of an experiment that could be used in further research. Since the finished text was, in any case, only one facet of the fable, the model book gave evidence of other aspects of the story and its telling.
Brecht’s influence on the contemporary theatre has been both considerable and problematic. His Marxist views have proved a real stumbling block to his assimilation in the West, and his use of formalist techniques in the service of entertainment has presented difficulties in the socialist countries. There is no doubt that the settings and costumes of his productions are the features that have most influenced the contemporary theatre. Contemporary design exhibits in many ways the influences of his staging. Howard Bay Clive Barker Theatre building after World War II
After World War II, Germany was left with hundreds of bombed-out theatres and opera houses; within 20 years (1950–70) more than 100 of them had been restored to their former state or else had been redesigned and rebuilt along contemporary lines. The chief innovator in stage design and mechanization was Walther Unruh, whose work is exemplified by the Deutsche Oper in West Berlin. There, the stage is cruciform in plan, employing lifts under the main stage, a sliding revolving stage with trapdoors upstage, and sliding stages right and left of the main stage; thus, it completes the process toward mechanization begun at the turn of the century by providing means for shifting fully plastic settings with great speed. The combination of stage engineering with acoustic sophistication and continental seating makes this building arguably the greatest modern opera house.
Beginning in the late 1950s, the United States and Canada constructed theatres, concert halls, and a variety of multipurpose facilities by the hundreds, in the greatest theatre-building boom ever known in the Western Hemisphere. The two fundamentally opposing conceptions of theatre design—proscenium style and open stage—predominate. The Alley Theatre, in Houston, Texas, is a fine example of the more radical school. In the United Kingdom the director Sir Tyrone Guthrie advocated a return to the open-stage techniques in his productions of Shakespeare at the Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Dance. Moving to Stratford, in Ontario, Canada, and assisted by stage designer Tanya Moiseyevich, Guthrie designed the Festival Theatre, which represents a fusion of the classical auditorium with the stage of Shakespeare. The experiment, with modifications, was repeated in 1963 at Minneapolis, where the Guthrie Theater was designed to Guthrie’s specifications. The Guthrie Theater, while it is reminiscent of his earlier theatre at Stratford, exhibits a studied asymmetry in plan and section in contrast to the older theatre’s ordered symmetry. A number of new British theatre buildings have been built in emulation of this design. George C. Izenour Clive Barker