Brecht in Practice: Staging Drama Dialectically

Bertolt Brecht (1998-1956) is one of the most influential and ambitious figures in twentieth-century theatre. While he is known to a broad public for his plays, which are often performed in UK theatres, he was also a great theorizer and practitioner of theatre, and it is the dialogue between these two roles that the project aims to disseminate beyond the academy.
Brecht did himself few favours by coining a series of terms that, on paper, can appear slippery, unachievable or obscure. Verfremdung, for example, has been variously translated as 'alienation', 'estrangement' and 'distanciation', but this process of 'making the familiar strange' in performance can be understood better in practice by articulating contradictory behaviours or attitudes. Other terms, such as Fabel, pose problems for both directors and actors who may struggle to understand how an emphasis on an interpreted version of a play's plot will help them better understand their roles. This project, then, is designed to address the apparent gulf between theory and practice, and is derived from primary research I have carried out into Brecht's practices at the theatre company he co-founded, the Berliner Ensemble.
The project takes as its starting point the 'Brechtian method' of staging drama. The method examines dramatic material for the relationships between the opinions, actions and behaviours of individuals, and the complex ways in which their society informs them. Brechtian directors seek to identify these relationships prior to rehearsal and then use these interpretations in their work with actors. Actors are, in turn, encouraged not to prepare their performances the night before rehearsing a scene, but to understand the scene's social premises and respond in the moment to the performances of other cast members. The aim is to generate lively work predicated on the social situation, rather than the perceived psychology of the characters. As a result, the more fixed 'character' gives way to the more fluid 'figure'. New modes of performance also emerge, ones that seek to connect the figure to its social context.
The concept of a 'method' suggests that Brecht was not only drafting new means for staging his own plays, but also those written by other dramatists. This project thus takes a play by an author not associated with the Brechtian tradition in order to demonstrate to theatre-makers and spectators that Brecht's ideas for and modes of making theatre extend beyond his own ways of conceiving drama. The play chosen for this project, Closer by Patrick Marber (1997), is, to all appearances, concerned with the complicated love-lives of its four characters. It is an exploration of the fickle nature of desire as the four couple, de-couple and re-couple over the course of twelve scenes in the pursuit of the intimacy suggested by the play's title. Brecht, however, invites theatre-makers to consider the social context of the scenes and asks why the characters are willing to 'chop and change' so frequently and why the goal of intimacy is so hard to attain. A Brechtian production may thus choose to examine a society in which human relationships have become increasingly commodified and relate its findings to the manners in which the figures engage with each other. Similarly, the erosion of community and the promotion of the individual in the post-Thatcherite 1990s also feeds into the emotional landscape of the play. A Brechtian production thus aims to relativize the autonomy of individual decision-making and frame it against the background of the given society's social codes. The link of personal behaviour to social values proposes that such behaviour can be changed if people change social structures, and this is the political hope that underlies Brechtian theatre.

There are primarily four groups of non-academic beneficiaries from this project:

1. Theatre-makers: this group, to differing degrees, will benefit from all three major outputs. The most intensive benefit will be felt by the actors involved in the rehearsal and performance of Closer, as they will be able to explore the Brechtian method first-hand. They will engage with new ways of approaching dramatic material and conceiving of character, and will be able to observe the development of a production that seeks to understand the personal in the context of the social. However, this process will be documented, and its most salient moments will form the basis of a website. The website will contain examples of practice to illustrate more general principles of Brechtian theatre, so that theatre-makers can compare Brecht's widely published theories with examples of how they can inform the concrete business of practice. Theatre-makers will also be able to contribute questions, responses and opinions to the site's forum section, which I will moderate to assure appropriate content. Finally, theatre-makers, understood in the first instance as directors and actors, will be offered free weekend-long workshops that will introduce them to and engage them with aspects of Brechtian theatre that they can then integrate into their own professional practice.
2. Post-GCSE dramas teachers: this group will, like the theatre-makers, above, be offered free workshops. Here, however, the sessions will focus on establishing the nature of Brecht's method and working through potential approaches to integrating it into the curriculum. Workshops will be available as one-day inset courses and tailored to the needs of the learners' specific contexts. Teachers will, of course, also have access to the website (publicized through online Drama teacher networks, e.g. the National Association for the Teaching of Drama), which is envisaged as an evolving resource, as more visitors contribute over time. The website will give real examples of rehearsal and practice as a way of helping teachers find suitable material upon which they can build classes.
3. Theatre students: this group will benefit primarily from the way Brecht may be taught in response to the project. As an HE drama lecturer, I have found Brecht taught in something of a 'tick box' style pre-university, that is, the various devices associated with Brecht are taken to embody his theatre as a whole. This project is concerned with making his method the starting point for theatre work that can legitimately be called 'Brechtian'. This is a fundamental change in the way Brecht is understood and, consequently, how future generations may respond to his work. Students may thus benefit indirectly from the workshops offered to both teachers, through their redefined understanding and pedagogy, and theatre-makers, through their implementation of new processes of making work under the Brechtian sign. Students also have access to the website.
4. Theatre-goers: this group will have the opportunity of seeing the results of a Brechtian process live in the form of the three public performances of Closer. This is, of course, the way in which theatre is supposed to be experienced, yet the production's audience is necessarily limited by the size of the venue at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. It is intended that the audience will include 'new end-users' due to the potential to attract and to engage a broad audience from Central's existing networks of spectators. However, other theatre-goers will derive wider benefits indirectly from the theatre-makers, teachers and students who engage with the project either through its workshops or its website because they will encounter further productions and pieces influenced by the project's modes of dissemination.