What is the "Epic Theatre?"

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The first thing you will likely notice about Mother Courage is how different it is from other plays you may have seen. At several points, you may think to yourself:

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"Well, they're singing, but they don't look happy..."

"Was she talking to me? I'm not a part of this show!"

"Why are they telling me what happens before it happens? Spoiler alert!"

"I thought this play was set in the 17th century- so why on earth does their wagon have electrical lights?"

"These characters are confusing. Whose side are they on?!"

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We are trying to do a different style of theatre than what American audiences are used to. Americans are generally more comfortable with plays by great authors such as August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, and many others who have worked primarily within the realist-naturalist style.

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The realist-naturalist style had risen to fame in Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century, but by the beginning of the 20th century, many European theatre theorists were already imagining alternatives to this paradigm. The "avant-garde" ranged from the Dadaists to the Surrealists to the Expressionists, among many others. Brecht was a major part of this "anti-realist" movement.

Brecht believed that the realist-naturalist paradigm wrongly depicted social phenomena- social injustice, especially- as inherent, universal, and independent of human agency. His moral and political convictions made him react in the strongest way against this notion, insisting on the potential for people to identify social problems and declare an allegiance with more humane models of social organization. He believed that the problems of a new age required a new type of play to talk about them. His solution to this need was the "Epic Theatre," which he describes here.

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Brecht describes these different styles of theatre not in terms of their techniques- which we will come to in a minute- but in terms of their effects on the audience. The scholar Peter Thomson has rightly defined Epic Theatre as a "design on audience." Brecht strove, more than anything, to change the way spectators thought about the theatre they were seeing- as well as the way they saw the world it strangely reflected.

The German word "Verfremdungseffekt" recurs repeatedly in Brecht's theoretical writings. This has been translated many different ways into English (alienation effect, estrangement, defamiliarization, etc.); not everyone is satisfied with any one particular version. The issue is that Brecht was using this word to define the relationship he wanted the audience to form with the play, and without a commonly agreed upon translation, we may miss nuances in his theories. In its place, however, we can make use of some of the other phrases he used to describe a new spectatorship.

In his early writings, he suggested that the viewing of a play should be almost indistinguishable from the viewing of sports. In 21st century America, where the fans are rabid and the events are broadcasted nationally on television daily, this sounds odd; but imagine what it must have been like in a time before television to watch a boxing match. From far away, the spectator watches the athlete's technique, not necessarily their personality. In doing so, they watch with a detached, analytical mindset; not the one of mindless fandom we would associate with sports viewing today.

Brecht also used the term "smoker's theatre" to describe this observational attitude. It seems as if he used this term quite literally:

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"I even think thar in a Shakespearean production one man in the stalls with a cigar could bring about the downfall of Western art. He might as well light a bomb as light his cigar. I would be delighted to see our public allowed to smoke during performances. And I'd be delighted mainly for the actors' sake. In my view it is quite impossible for the actor to play unnatural, cramped, and old-fashioned theatre to a man smoking in the stalls."

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Brecht set out to write plays and direct them that would train the audience's eye to see theatre in a new way. As he wrote more plays in this style and they were presented to new audiences, eventually a set of conventions became familiar to Epic Theatre. Let us look closer at what Epic Theatre does.

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Epic Theatre Techniques

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Separation of Elements

Realist-naturalist productions insist on "unity." Design elements such as lights, sounds, and set pieces are supposed to work together in creating "the world of the play," which the audience member "sinks" into. The stage pictures we see are supposed to "mirror" real life, so that in watching the play we may be able to mistake fiction for fact.

Working in the opposite direction, Brecht sought a "separation of elements" to make different components of the world work against each other. He wanted the audience to remember the fact that they were in a theatre, watching a play- even if the play was meant to comment on real life itself..

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Episodic  or "Montage" Structure

Realist-naturalist dramas depict series of events that lead inevitably from one to the next, from inciting action through rising action to climax and then eventually resolution. This has also been called the "Aristotelean plot structure." 

Brecht often called his plays "Anti-Aristotelean." Epic plays use an "episodic" plot structure, which depicts series of events more or less independent of one another- in extreme cases, without a clear internal logic. Many anti-realists used episodic structures, including the German Expressionists, but Brecht more than likely got this idea from early iterations of cinema, like Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), which is still studied in film schools for its use of montage sequences. (Brecht also declared an affinity for the films of Charlie Chaplin.)

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Use of Placards

Realist-naturalist dramas seek to hide bits of information from the reader or viewer until the right time. The audience members are only supposed to figure out new information as the characters do, so that we feel their surprise, their elation, their disappointment.

Brecht used projections to tell the audience what was about to happen in a scene before they had even watched it. He wanted audiences to know this so that they could watch how the scene developed, as opposed to wait on the edge of their seat for the next big moment. It also draws more attention to the characters and how their decisions lead to the end. (It's not altogether different from watching a great movie- for the second time.)

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Contradictory Characters

In Brecht's plays, we come across characters who are split right down the middle. We have always been able to imagine characters as having internal conflict, given that it's part of the human condition. But what sets Brecht's plays apart here is that his main characters have alter egos, silent doubles which function as mirrors.

Take Mother Courage, for instance. She is reflected on the one hand by her daughter, Kattrin, who never speaks. Kattrin's character is related to the thought of marriage, of settling down, of maternity. On the other hand, Mother Courage is reflected by the character of Yvette. Yvette is a prostitute; that character is connected to the idea of business, staying on the move, and self-promotion. These two characters are quite literally personifications of Mother Courage's mutually conflicting desires.

This pattern proceeds through several of Brecht's most famous plays. In Good Person of Setzuan, the main character, the prostitute Shen Te, is able to buy a tobacco shop, but when her good nature is exploited by relatives and locals, she creates the alter ego of Shui Ta to protect herself. If Shen Te is defined by altruism, then Shui Ta is defined by frugality. But both Shen Te and Shui Ta are the same person- how can the opposites live in the same character?

Brecht believed that people change once exposed to social pressures- specifically, the pressures of necessity and ideology. Both of these represent the formative influence of capitalism on the life of the soul.

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Epic Acting

Imagine how confusing this can get for the actor, who is trying to embody a character that is several different things at once.

Just as Stanislavsky had formulated acting theories to support the realist-naturalist texts of Ibsen and Chekhov, Brecht knew that his new style would need new theories of performance. Epic acting is more presentational than other schools of acting we are familiar with. Actors "demonstrate" how their character works and their role in the social world, rather than "embody" or "live through" the character. 

Some actors have described this experience as "acting in first and third person at the same time." One can detect "doubleness" here, which is quite in line with the contradictory composition of those characters. (Brecht often encouraged his actors to "take an attitude" towards their character, reinforcing the notion that the actor is both the actor and the character on stage.)

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Brecht ties many of these ideas and tactics together for us in this way:

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"The orthodox playwright's objection to the titles [placards] is that the dramatist ought to say everything that has to be said in the action, that the text must express everything within its own confines. The corresponding attitude for the spectator is that he should not think about a subject, but within the confines of the subject. But this way of subordinating everything to a single idea, this passion for propelling the spectator along a single track where he can look neither right nor left, up nor down, is something that the new school of play-writing must reject. Footnotes, and the habit of turning back in order to check a point, need to be introduced into play-writing too.

Some exercise in complex seeing is needed- though it is perhaps more important to be able to think above the stream than to think in the stream. Moreover the use of screens imposes and facilitates a new style of acting. This style is the epic style. As he reads the projections on the screen the spectator adopts an attitude of smoking-and-watching."

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