Epic Theatre and the Brechtian Method
Bertolt Brecht started working on his theatre theories during 1920s and his practice was mostly influenced by the German director Erwin Piscator who had already coined the phrase “Epic Theatre” at that time. Piscator showed the signs of a new theatre era and Brecht contributed and developed these theatre forms.
Brecht’s theories refused to follow the traditional dramatic theatre which sought for audience’s empathy and created a perfect illusion of reality. Rather, he focused on finding a way to shock his audience by making the incidents in his plays “strange and abstract”.
After years of practice, he produced The Caucasian Chalk Circle in 1948, a play based on two plays: an ancient Chinese play named Yuan dynasty and a German adaptation of it called Der Kreidekreis. In the play, we can see Brecht’s non-conformist approach to theatre he created as he does not hesitate to show the wrongdoings of the society. Throughout the play, he motivates his audience to think intellectually and politically through themes like having separate narratives for each scene, reason and his version of alienation in theatre “verfremdungseffekt”.
In the Caucasian Chalk Circle, scenes jump quickly from one to another and it gives a feeling of traveling in time as each scenes takes place in a different place. The first scene is in the valleys of Caucasus where two soviet farm kolchos (collectives) debate about who the land belongs to. The fruit farmer kolchos take the land as both kolchos agree that their plan to increase the crop yield benefits the land the most. And the scene shifts to another play as one of the fruit farmers starts telling the story of old Grusinia people. This interruption alone is a proof of his technique of making each scene unique in its own way, almost like they’re all little plays came together as one. He explains the reason why he uses this technique in A Short Organum for the Theatre: “The individual episodes have to be knotted together in such a way that the knots are easily noticed. The episodes must not succeed one another indistinguishably but must give us a chance to interpose our judgement” (67).
The scene continues with a play about a custody dispute; when the Governor of Grusinia gets overthrown, his wife flees the country, leaving his son Michael behind. Her maid, Grusha, takes the child and begins a journey to cross on the other side of the mountains, where she thinks they’ll be safe. Though, two years later the new leader gets beheaded so the old regime makes a comeback along with the dead Governor’s wife. Soldiers find Grusha and Michael and rip him out of her arms to return him to his biological mother.
The play is once again interrupted to take the audience back in time to tell the story of the clerk named Azdak and how he became the judge of the Grusinia. After the Governor is overthrown, The Grand Duke seeks refuge in Azdak’s house disguised as a poor beggar. When Azdak realizes who he is, he wants to hand himself in and demands to come before the Judge. Ironically, the Judge is beheaded so when the new regime holds a voting, Soldiers choose Azdak to be the new Judge. Then the audience gets to see what kind of a Judge Azdak is as he accepts bribes and makes amoral and unorthodox judgements.
Then the narrative goes back to Grusha’s story but this time Grusha comes back to Gruisinia to fight for Michael’s custody. Azdak decides to use a test to see who the real mother is so he orders a chalk circle to be drawn and Michael to be placed in its centre. Whoever pulls the child to her side, wins the custody. But Grusha refuses to hurt the child so Azdak declares her to be the real mother and gives her the custody of the child. Through this play-within-a-play method, Brecht enables his characters to remain in the present, at the moment where the audience sits back and tries to predict characters’ new moves.
Brecht does not aim to have the audience feel like they’re in the play but rather hopes for them to think rationally from an outsider perspective about how the characters could’ve behaved. In 1927, he wrote: “The essential point of the epic theatre is perhaps that it appeals less to feelings than to the spectator’s reason” (Weitz 268). But to arouse critical thinking in the audience, Brecht helps them to understand the world they live in first. Even if the audience is not politically aware, Brecht uses his storytelling to show how the lower class is being exploited and oppressed by the capitalist system and its leaders.
Through this method, he manages his audience to adapt the Marxist perspective while making them decide between the right and wrong in matters of life and death. For example, during Grusha’s escape, she stops at a farm to buy some milk for the baby but the farmer overcharges her. When we first look at this event, we immediately blame the farmer because there’s a poor woman running away from a war-torn city with a baby in her arms. But then we get to hear the farmers story; soldiers have looted his farm and killed his cows. The reason why he overcharges her is because he’s starving too. This scene solely proves how Brecht’s method functions efficiently as he never lets the audience empathize with one character and does not lead them into a catharsis situation. Rather, he makes them critically challenge their own bias about how the world operates.
The epic theatre’s most distinguished theme is alienation, verfremdungseffekt as Brecht calls it. Brecht explained this technique as “stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them” (Kalugampitiya, “The Brechtian Notion of Alienation Effect”). In other words, it’s how Brecht makes familiar things look strange in his plays. He does not hesitate to show the systemic corruptions but he also gives his audience to think for the ways to change this. He uses the stage as an experimental place and the observers know that they do not belong to the world in which characters live in.
To support this idea, Brecht gives breaks in-between acts as the crew prepares the decor for the next act and the audience has no choice but to watch this interrupt at the stage action. While watching this theatrical experiment, observers do not switch off their critical thinking because they’re given enough time to get back to reality and realize what they’re experiencing. It is mostly questions Brecht plants in the minds of his audience: Why does Grusha risk her own life for a child she didn’t even bore? Out of all other people, why Grusha? Why does Azdak, a man who abuses his power, let Grusha take the child instead of siding with the rich?
Brecht would also use his scene titles to hint at the audience about what would happen in the act as he did not want them to be overwhelmed by their suspense to a point of forgetting they were in a theatre play. Just like he does in the Act I, where the audience finds out who the land belongs to without even having to wait until the end of the play. This method is all about keeping the audience focused on matters that create the wrongdoings in this world rather than blinding them to these matters in a moment of emotion stream.
The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a play about corruption disguised as a story of a mother and son. Though, Brecht’s decision to give this play a happy-ending, perhaps, reflects his own Marxist perspective on the world. As pessimistic as the world is, there is still hope that one day justice will be restored and there will be many more mothers who will reunite with their sons. For this revolution, Brecht needs more people on his side to make a lasting impact and he does not hesitate to use his epic theater methods to not only educate people politically but also be the voice of the poor.
