Performing Brecht
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he was determined to ensure that he and his work would be available to both East and West, and thus his commitment to Communism was made on his own terms. Brecht also drew criticism from some of his supporters for appearing to condone Stalin’s barbaric form of Communism in Russia, and again for failing to criticise the East German government’s use of Russian tanks to restore order after the Berlin uprising of June 1953. As Peter Thomson says in his account of Brecht’s life: There is much about him, what he did and what he failed to do, that makes him vulnerable. He was a man who lived untidily, but who combined timorousness and combativeness as few people have. (Thomson and Sachs, 1994, p.38) Crucially, the corollary of Brecht’s Marxism was his creation of play-texts that were based on a social, economic and historical understanding of the development of human life and behaviour and its institutions, and which expressed Brecht’s passionate concern for the poor, the disempowered and the disenfranchised in society. His aim was not just to reflect the real world in his drama but to contribute to its change and improvement. While his deeply felt pacifism was readily acceptable to many at the time of and immediately after the war of 1939– 45, his anti-capitalist stance was more of a problem in the capitalist West. The ideals and heartfelt beliefs expressed in his plays were put into theatrical practice by Brecht operating through a working method and process that was open, experimental and collaborative, and which placed emphasis on the ensemble rather than on the individual performer. And this method and process were (and are) as much a stumbling block to his full acceptance in Britain’s theatre environment as was and is his Marxism per se. To compound the problem, much of his creative work appeared to arrive here already wrapped in the brown paper of Brechtian dramatic theory. There has always been an unwilling-ness in Britain to contemplate or work via a theoretical basis for art. British theatre, it might be argued, has never paid open respect to the intellectual approach; instead, it has thrived on traditional approaches and instinct, not on revolution and theoretical debate. Those ap-proaches include an eclectic manner in the creating of the professional actor (‘training’ is not a prerequisite for membership of the profession), though the predominance of a ‘naturalistic’ performance style in mainstream theatre (supported by television and film) results in the fact that a ‘psychological’ approach to character has been (and is) the dominant approach to a part for most actors. However, the paucity of rehearsal time in the British professional theatre, and the frequent concern on the part of directors to create ‘scenes’ rather than motivation, has encouraged the actors’ reliance on their own instinctual understanding of what a part requires rather than on the development of a systematic process based on training. This, plus a basic
was seen (as he often still is) as characteristically ‘heavy’, boring and lacking in a sense of humour, or at least irony – in fact the kind of playwright he himself deplored in his own, rational theatre. Furthermore, he was a Marxist and thus his ideas were (and are) unlikely to be suited to the mainly bourgeois institution of British theatre and theatregoers. Since Brecht’s ideology has so often been a barrier to a full appreciation of his work in Britain, and consequently appears regularly in this book, it is worth briefly spelling out here the basis and implications of his political beliefs. Brecht’s commitment to the classic Marxist tradition of ‘dialectical materialism’ (the idea that the individual is created by socio-political and economic factors and is, therefore, able to change his circumstances and environment) provided a ‘legitimacy’ (in his view at least) for an interventionist form of theatre. Brecht’s ‘discovery’ of Marxism (in 1928/9) confirmed his already well-developed idea that theatre should have a social function. As he said, he ‘had written a whole pile of Marxist plays without knowing it’ (Völker, 1979, p. 110). His ‘epic theatre’ was based on the concept of the primary importance of production in social life and it was intended to demonstrate socialism as the constant revolutionising of the forces and relations within the processes of production. Brecht often spoke of his form of theatre as one designed to make a contribution to ‘the full unfettering of everybody’s productivity’ (Suvin, 1984, p.20). He would admit, however, that in order for epic theatre to work fully, the actors involved in the production needed to share a Marxist view of the world. Certainly many theatre critics and historians would agree that without a knowledge of Marxist philosophy and aesthetics, it is virtually impossible to grasp the full meaning of Brecht’s plays. For example, Marxist philosophy is fundamental to Brecht’s dramaturgical exploration of the relationship between the individual and society. As a playwright, he builds up a complex framework of social, political, economic, historical and personal factors, which determine the character as an individual; his phrase for this is ‘statistical causality’. This approach to characterisation enables Brecht to demonstrate through his plays a wider range of possibilities for human behaviour than is the case with more ‘naturalistic’, psychologically-based drama. Brecht’s politics have, of course, been used frequently against him – as a reason for rejecting his artistic achievements, and as a ‘stick’ with which to beat him and expose the apparent hypocrisy in his personal behaviour. His detractors often draw attention to the fact that he never actually joined the Communist Party and that, after returning to East Berlin in 1949, he obtained an Austrian passport (1950), gave exclusive publishing rights to his writing to a West German publisher, and maintained a Swiss bank account. Equally notably, Brecht even refused to sign a binding contract with his own company, the Berliner Ensemble, until 1953, when he signed a form of ‘open’ agreement. In extenuation, it might be claimed that after his years in exile, when his artistic ambitions and activities had been inevitably limited,
The book concludes with a chapter that considers Brecht in the light of recent, postmodernist and other developments in theatre. It draws on contemporary ideas on performance of significant practitioners such as Augusto Boal, Eugenio Barba, Howard Barker, David Hare and, in particular, Edward Bond, and assesses ways in which Brecht’s plays may be performed now. Finally, it speculates about the future and the continuing need for Brechtian theatre. As the man himself said: We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help trans-form the field itself. (B on T, p.190)
Examples of British Brecht discussed here include George Devine’s production of The Good Woman of Setzuan, Sam Wanamaker’s The Threepenny Opera and William Gaskill’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. (Throughout this book all the play titles given reproduce exactly the translations used for the particular productions discussed.) The chapter also includes a brief assessment of the relationship between the work of Brecht and that of key British playwrights: John Arden, Arnold Wesker, John Osborne, Robert Bolt and Edward Bond. Chapter 3 describes the ways in which the political upheavals of 1968 and the social and artistic developments in Britain made Brecht eminently suitable and accessible to radical theatre groups. It analyses the impact of politically committed theatre practitioners’ attempts to take on all aspects of Brecht’s dramatic theory, political philosophy and, as far as possible, theatre practice. Detailed analyses of Brecht productions by some key radical companies (e.g. Foco Novo, Belt and Braces Roadshow, Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, Manchester’s Contact Theatre and Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre) demonstrate how their commitment to the integra-tion of political meaning and aesthetic expression contributed to the growing understanding and acceptance of Brecht’s theatre in Britain. This achievement is contrasted in Chapter 4 with the ways in which Brecht’s plays were incorporated into the classical repertoire by the national companies – the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre – in the 1970s and 1980s. Here there is an assessment of the damaging impact on these Brecht productions of the companies’ hierarchical structure and organisation, the all-too-frequently non-collaborative approaches to production, and the undue emphasis placed on performance style and set design, often in isolation from a genuine commitment to the intrinsic, socio-political meaning of the texts. The chapter centres on the productions of Brecht in the 1970s and 1980s for the Royal Shakespeare Company directed by Howard Davies, and on those at the National Theatre directed by John Dexter and Richard Eyre. Chapter 5 presents three case studies, that is, detailed accounts based on access to rehears-als and on interviews with the relevant directors and performers, of three major British productions of Brecht plays in the early 1990s. The first case study is of the award-winning production of The Good Person of Sichuan at the National Theatre in 1989/90, directed by Deborah Warner, with Fiona Shaw as Shen Te/Shui Ta. The second is of the Citizens Theatre’s 1990 production of Mother Courage, directed by Philip Prowse, with Glenda Jackson in the title role. And the third is of the National Theatre’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed in 1991 by Di Trevis, with Antony Sher as Ui. The main focus of this chapter and its case-studies is the relationship in practice between Brechtian theory, and the aesthetics and the politics of the texts, in both the rehearsal process and the finished performances.
