Just Leave Him Alone, He'll Get Over It

Extracts from Brecht's Short Organum via Spock

Brecht and Lehrstücke

Brecht's problem with the 'great flowering' of German theatre in the aftermath of World War I was its failure 'to present on stage the great themes of our time' (Ed. Willett, 1964: 77). Of course, he continued, the contemporary environment had been presented in plays: giving the examples of the trenches and the stock exchange, he dismisses these as mere 'background for a sort of sentimental 'magazine story that could have taken place at any other time' (ibid). It is only through modern innovations in technology - such as Piscator's use of film - that contemporary themes could be properly incorporated into the narrative.

(Brecht also mentions that 'the great cartoonist George Grosz made valuable contributions for the projections'.)

Brecht's article in The New York Times (November 24, 1935) argues the cases for 'epic' theatre, and claims that 'the learning play' (Lehrstücke) was made possible by a shift in attitude and the inclusion of technological advances: moving platforms on the stage, new facilities for music that encouraged talented composers to write for theatre, as well as film and projection. But he also recognised the necessity of collaboration - historians and sociologists became part of his team, and 'the training... for the new style of acting, the epic style, took place' (1964: 79).

Brecht deliberated named his new approach 'epic' to challenge the division in Aristotle's Poetics between the tragic and the epic modes of poetry. Noting (in Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction, 1964: 70) that even Aristotle's definitions admitted of some porosity , Brecht drew a distinction between the tragic theatre, which encouraged audiences to see the events as 'essentially static: its task is to show the world as it is' (1964: 79) and the epic with a 'task to show the world as it changes ) and also how it may be changed' (ibid.). He also demands respect for the audience: the tragic treats them as 'a mob... while the latter theatre holds that the audience is a collection of individuals, capable of thinking and reasoning, of making judgments even in the theatre' (ibid.).

What Brecht doesn't mention in his article is the Marxist intentions of his Lehrstücke. 

Brecht on the Gestus

Brecht on the theatre of the 1920s

Alienation: it's not just boredom, Brecht

In the Lyceum's production of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, it

takes around two and a half hours to get to the nub of the story: in an almost throwaway line, the story-teller musician explains that the land, like everything else, belongs to those who care. This simple platitude - which hardly explains the political dilemma that begins the epic adventure - seems redundant and disappointing. In the previous scenes, maternal heroism had battled with legal corruption, revolutionary promiscuity and masculine dishonesty. Brecht's pat moral seems too small, too obvious to do justify to the scope of the story.

Now, young lady. What can you bring to my part?

The two most well known facts about Brechtian theatre, after his rejection of all American values except the casting couch, are that it is supposed to be politically engaged (he said that Marx would have been his perfect audience member), and that it breaks the fourth wall (apparently, this involves shouting at the audience rather than pretending that they are not there). A more developed interpretation of these fantastic facts are that Brecht strove to show alienation in his productions, encouraging the audience to see how the apparent inevitability of situations was, actually a function of capitalist tyranny.

Disregarding the frequent assertion that Brecht failed to integrate his theories into his scripts (most contemporary productions home in on his vivid characterisation or energy, making them a romp rather than the cerebral vision he desired), the 'alienation effect' is in action at the end of the CCC. Having involved the audience in all sorts of shenanigans - mountain crossings, unhappy marriages - he abruptly halts the action with a moral that does not actually add anything - it just grinds the action to a halt. It looks like a simple finale, but leaves behind more questions than answers.

Most of all, it refuses to return to the play that begun the evening,

that play that then has the play-within-a-play. That play is an earnest discussion about the use of land following a war - exactly the kind of rhetorical bore that subsumes the theatrical for political worthiness. Whether there was a flood of relief the first time that this play gave way to the more mythical narrative is a matter of conjecture - although I have nightmares about going to see CCC only to find that the bit about the baby and the mother has been replaced by three hours of chat about the relative value of industrial and agrarian economies.

By leaving that open-ended, Brecht has given the audience something to chat about: what decision would be reached, and how does all that running about the Caucasus reflect the issue of land distribution. Admirably, Brecht develops his characters to a point of complexity (his proletarian judge, for example, is both champion of the poor and a rape apologist). There are no easy answers.

And by having a folk tale, Bertie gives his audience some fun before they get all serious. Doubtless, the bores in the bar have a fine time trying to figure it all out, but better bores with beer battling bombastically than stupid signifiers of social systems struggling on stage.

Mark Thomson on Brecht and Beyond...

Mark Thomson is the artistic director of The Lyceum, in

Edinburgh. When I asked him for a chat about his upcoming production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, he was generous enough to give me too much for the article... here is the complete interview...

What is it about Brecht that has made him such a looming presence in the theatre of the last half century? Do you have a particular love for his approach and ideas about theatre?

I think anyone who enters their place of work and challenges on the two fronts of WHY are we doing this and HOW should we do this is key in the development of any profession or art form. 

 It’s difficult to overestimate the influence he had but the truth is that a lot of what he brought is inherent in standard theatre “think” now. 

 The idea that Brecht always wanted you to be aware and acknowledge the truth that this is a group of actors who are telling this story and not “pretending” that we “are” this or that person is keenly theatrical. 

It doesn't mean he’s not serving truth – he’s just challenging how we create truths and saying that it might not always be through trying to be “real.” The thing I keep talking about with the company is to abandon consistency. 

Caucasian shifts restlessly from one style to another, from naturalism to singing to crazy carnivalesque creatures. And each needs tending to and doesn't want smoothed out. The other thing is that for Brecht there was no such thing as a “character” that stood and remained definitive throughout a play. The “situation” was key to understanding why people did the things they did. 

So, a raping Sergeant is a rapist because of his circumstance of war. Monsters are born from monstrous situations. In another war-less universe he’s a father taking his daughter for swimming lessons.

And the Chalk Circle: why did you go for this script at this time?
I felt that the theatre needed to articulate or respond to the times we are in where there seems an unstoppable march toward widening the gap between the rich and the poor; when those who govern are led by power rather than principle. 

 Even in theatre it’s interesting that we have people like Brian Cox and Julie Walters are questioning whether the they could have entered the profession now and are we going to have very little working class actors entering the profession in which case there is a huge challenge to the stage’s ability to reflect the society it is supposed to be representing. 

 So Caucasian really simply says there might be another way of thinking. It has the boldness of a parable in the truths it identifies but has a wonderfully complex political and human understanding that is celebrated by vivid, musical, comedic and emotional theatre.

Does the CCC fit well with the general identity of the Lyceum?
I don't recognize the idea of the Lyceum Theatre having an identity. It’s a place of the imagination. A space where stories are told to another group of people. It’s a human place where views are exchanged, worlds are brought to life through word, picture, sound and light. The walls disappear and no one is looking at the chandelier when the act of theatre is successful.

Does working on this large scale present any unexpected challenges?
Not unexpected but it certainly does. And by challenges I don’t think negatively. I have a company of 13, eight of whom are multi instrumentalists, one who is an expert puppeteer, somewhere is the region of 40 locations and over a hundred characters and an amazing epic journey of a story about an extraordinary young woman. 

 What I love about the whole idea of companies like the Lyceum is that we have Faith Healer on and it’s a three hander, monologues – people and words. And now we’re in a carnivalesque storytelling with different demands, offers, tone. The quixotic leaps from show to show energize and transform the space where we meet our audience and defines it as a place of surprise that provokes your mind and senses and makes you feel more alive than before you entered the room. 

And as Brecht might agree, if you feel more alive you'll feel more capable of change. And Brecht’s great optimism is that he believed people/we can change. And boy oh boy I think we all know we need to.

RSNO Alchemy

No Emotions, Please: We're Actors

In an intriguing commentary on Ubu and The Truth Commission (Handspring, EIF 2014), Joyce McMillan champions Brecht's insistence on a theatre that plays to the mind, not the emotions. Recognising that Brecht overdoes it a bit (in theory, at least), she is suspicious of those performances at the Fringe that provoked tears - even worrying that emotionalism has become the gold standard of theatrical quality.

McMillan's manifesto is not about promoting cerebral theatre over the emotive: rather, she draws a contrast between those plays that seem to offer a personal, emotional catharsis and others which hint at the possibility of social change. While her analysis of Ubu emphasises the performance's use of alienation (the characters are too unpleasant to encourage identification), she allies the production to political theatre that suggests change is possible.

Of course. there is a context to this contrast: like the Pope and the Queen, McMillan is careful not to be explicit, but the Referendum (c) is lurking in everything these days. The preference for cerebral theatre is an appeal to reason as a higher virtue than emotion. That she ignores political plays that are emotive - or indeed, the dynamic emotionalism of Full Tilt ('Angie Darcy, as Janis, so brilliant and intense both musically and dramatically that it lifts the hairs on the back of the neck') which expertly captured the fury of Janis Joplin's rock rebellion - is not to decry their value, but state that theatre is a place for discussion and reflection. 

Brecht's ideals for 'epic' theatre were an designed antagonism to Aristotle's 'tragic' theatre - the previous gold standard (lasting around two and a half thousand years, through various interpretations). Aristotle is difficult to interpret clearly (first of all, he probably didn't write his Poetics, but they were notes made at his lectures by students), but his notion of katharsis  is all about 'purging' emotions. The odd bit of classical theatre criticism left, aside from Aristotle suggests audience did get worked up (the anonymous Life of Aeschylus says that women miscarried when the Furies came on in The Eumenides), and Brecht's resistance to sympathetic characters was an original approach.

As McMillan points out, Brecht failed, anyway: Mother Courage is often produced as a meditation on either the bravery of Courage's daughter (when she alerts a village to approaching troops at the cost of her own life) or Courage's indefatigable energy. 

Even if there is something austere about rejecting emotional responses - Presbyterian even  - McMillan's thesis does challenge models of theatre that reject the intellect in favour of easy targets...

tbc

More on Alienation... with Sartre and a very special guest...

'Hello and welcome to Excavating Existentialism.'

'I think you can stop right there, Gareth. You are just going to give me a comedy French accent and make jokes about garlic and libidinous Marxists. You know that my philosophy denies any kind of essential nature, especially national ones.'

'I'm sorry, Jean-Paul. I wanted to ask about the god-shaped hole, that's all.'

'Is this in the context of alienation? Are you seeking to make a connection between one of my catch-phrases and the Marxism that inspired me to become a hero of The French Resistance?'

'I thought that the kind of existential despair felt in Matthew Arnold's Sea of Faith in the nineteenth century became a meme in the twentieth: when faith in God retreats, a gap is left behind, which is what you identified.'

'Indeed: but this God-shaped hole represents a longing for the divine that cannot be satiated. It is in Pascal and CS Lewis - Christian writers both. God does not exist, it is a contradiction, and the longing to fill the hole is self-defeating.'

'Isn't this longing similar to experience of alienation? The sense of something missing?'

'Alienation is complicated. Maybe you could ask Brecht - if you can stop yourself from giving him a comedy German accent?'

'Hello and welcome to Divining Dramaturgy. With me, I have Bertie 'Cushions' Brecht...'

'I display alienation on stage, not make it. It already exists inside the individual, thanks to capitalism. The
audience, while smoking a cigar, spots it in the drama, and considers alternative actions.'

'I'm actually more interested in sound at the moment. My feeling is that the history of music since the rise of atheism has been the attempt by the musician to express the profound sense of alienation the human feels from nature, in recognising their inevitable death. That art and music are attempts to both articulate this madness and to create a community that replaces the church.'

'They are simultaneously expressions of alienation and a weapon against it? Like my plays?'

'I like to think so, Bertie.'

'The way I worked with Weill - like Wagner in his Ring cycle - had the words working against the grain of the music. That disparity could represent the gap between word and emotion, life and potential happiness. The music is the emotional subtext, you think?'

'If I may just go back to Jean-Paul for a moment... in your Huis Clos, you picture a hell - which could not exist in your philosophy. But you are happy to present one on stage. Is this another example of the disjuncture between the possible and the real? If you like, a way of highlighting alienation?'

'I could tell you, but I won't.'

'Why not?'

'If you reject my opinion, you are reading against the script's author's intentions (I am not one of those 'Death-of-the-Author' maniacs). But f you accept it, it would be bad faith on your part.'

Miss Julie @ The Citizens

 Although Strindberg's Miss Julie is recognised as an important moment in the development of 'naturalism' in theatre, Dominic Hill's direction of Zinnie Harris' updating owes as much to Brecht and classical models of tragedy. The sparse, neutral set and the broad characterisations of the central couple, servant John and the daughter of the master Julie firmly define the story as the tragic destruction of a woman, drawing out both the proto-feminism of Strindberg's source script and the oppressive society that defines individuals less by potential or personality than by their status.

The heart of the plot lies in the seduction of Miss Julie by the servant, John: although Louise Brearley plays Julie with an initial haughtiness, Harris' John is clearly in command, his changes of mood less capricious than the calculated attacks of a bully intent on getting his way. There is a palpable lack of sexual frisson between this John and Julie: Keith Fleming performs John with a consistent brutality, rarely swaggering, never sensual. That Julie can be seduced by a braggart and a bully  - his confession of love for her is unconvincing but calculated to appeal to her romantic dreams - is alienating and uncomfortable.

It is here that Hill's Brechtian influence is most evident.  In his attempt to make theatre that has a socialist

message, and can promote political change, Brecht developed the idea of an audience that is more intellectual than emotionally engaged. By encouraging a distance between the performance and the audience, Brecht hoped to exposed the structures beneath the action, and allow the audience to observe how the events could have played out differently. With Fleming's brutish performance, it becomes difficult to understand why Miss Julie would be erotically fascinated by the servant: his kisses are rough, not in any animalistic sexual manner, but like an attack. When he suddenly drops her, after having had her, it is clear that he is interested in her as a means to satisfy his own ends.

Without the sexual chemistry that has made Miss Julie a morally ambiguous study of sexual and social power-plays, it is clear that Brearley's Miss Julie is not seeing the same John as the audience. Her clumsy flirtations in the early scenes suggest less maturity than she claims: the scripts descriptions of her father's savagery and Julie's treatment of her fiance imply that she is familiar with violence and is attracted by her seducer's thuggishness. From his scenes with his fiancee Christine (Jessica Hardwick), John is revealed immediately as arrogant and chauvinistic. Even before John confesses his love of Miss Julie - which he describes as a virus in a bluff, antagonistic complaint - it is clear that he is a bully.

Hill's production exposes Miss Julie's mistake: and it is here that the plot takes on a tragic tone. Miss Julie does follow some of Aristotle's 'guidelines' for tragedy: there is a unity of location, time and plot, and there are three actors, just as in the golden age of Athenian drama. Miss Julie's story  - like a tragic heroine, she is high-born - follows the predictable path towards her doom. Her failure to recognise John for what he is become her 'tragic flaw' (hamartia).

By presenting Julie as naive, and John as vicious, Hill's production both highlights the tragic line of the plot and alienates the audience from an easy emotional engagement with either character. It's a remarkable trick: Brecht regarded his approach as an antidote to the aristocratic bias of Aristotelian tragic theory. Naturalism - a theatrical movement led by Ibsen and Strindberg (which concidently overlapped with their mutual interest in the role of women in society) - is less of a bridge between the two modes than a specific response to the rise of science in the nineteenth century, rejecting supernatural interventions (like the gods of Greek tragedy of Hamlet's father's ghost) and following Darwin's ideas about evolution (exposing human personality as a product of natural selection).

This naturalism is a far cry from the 'gritty realism' of contemporary drama, and Harris' adaptation builds on the psychological depth of Strindberg's characterisation to explore the specific dilemma of a woman, like Miss Julie, who has been encouraged to act like a man (by her mother) and beaten (by her father). By delineating this characterisation so precisely, Harris reveals Strindberg's talent for expressing the motivations of his characters and allows the production to create the emotional distance between audience and performers without forcing the actors to slip into caricatures.

By updating the play into 1920s Scotland, during a strike, and recasting the Lord as a mill-owner determined to break a strike, Harris doesn't so much lend a contemporary relevance as locate the sexual battle within a wider set of social changes. John, like many bullies, is cowed by the master's presence - suggesting that his attitude towards women is based in insecurity - and Christine voices a conservative and religious faith in the rightness of hierarchy. Off-stage, the striking mill-workers celebrate (and are defeated): a reminder that the upsetting of the sexual hierarchy expressing in the tryst reflects wider conflicts.

It also adds to the claustrophobia of the final scenes, when Miss Julie realises that she cannot escape. Strikes
are preventing travel, and the father's guards are poised to prevent her leaving the estate. Both the old and new social orders are restraining Miss Julie: that John talks proudly of the workers' resistance (while failing to actively support them) is a reminder that supposedly radical political change may not address the oppression of women.

True to the tragic influences, the unfolding of the plot is pessimistic: only through death can Miss Julie escape. But Fleming's John provokes her suicide, turning back into the lowly servant on the return of his Lordship and using the threat of his wrath to terrify Julie. The lack of compassion from both Christine and John isolates Julie - Christine's sudden aggression is an explosion of emotion from beneath the placid acceptance she displays in the early scenes. It is only in the final moments that the mesh of Brecht, naturalism and tragedy is betrayed: the suicide is presented as a sudden black-out, Brearley holding the knife to her throat in a melodramatic pose.

The final is an act of bad faith in Hill's sophisticated direction: the subtle interaction between the subtext of the seduction and the performances is undermined by crass emotionalism. Fleming's John is reduced to a melodramatic villain, and Julie is stripped of her dignity as a tragic heroine. Throughout the play, there are shocks - the rough kisses, the sudden reversal of John's enthusiasm when he realised that he can't use Julie to fulfil his fantasy of being a businessman. Yet the last image is contrived to surprise, to present horror rather than fear and pity (as in Aristotle's strictures) or intellectual analysis (per Brecht).

It's War

Mark E Smith out of the Fall - a man I have to thank for my enthusiasm for contemporary dance and ear-splitting music that respects no boundaries - has a song about people like me: Beware the Middlemass. I think it is about how a generation that has grown up without a war will be less wary of the dangers of armed conflict, and see it as a bit like a computer game.


He wrote it before the Gulf Wars, which suggests that he has some interesting clairvoyant skills, as well as a knack for a tuneless melody.






My firm belief that theatre can bring home those issues that I have not experienced is usually tested and broken: it's too easy to use war, and violence, as a metaphor on stage, reducing literal horror to a trite parable. But what if war can be portrayed on stage?








Sunflower Theatre are giving it a shot with Adele's Heart. Originally in Italian, the show has had great reviews in the Italian press - the writer, Giampiero Rappa, has been called “one of the greatest talents of Italian theater” by Il Manifesto, but has been translated for its UK debut.






The play is a modern love story set against the backdrop of an unnamed war. Two contrasting characters are forced together, and act out the stages of a relationship in the high pressure situation of being surrounded by guns and fighting. A little bonus is that the two actors are lovers in real life: they met on a film set and the rest is history.














The Space on North Bridge, Theater 1(V36) August 6-11 @ 22.30











Next up is an interesting one: it won an award from the Daily Mail.




For any readers outside of Scotland, I would like to make it clear that I do not endorse the opinions of the Daily Mail. Most people in the arts like to make cheap jokes at the newspaper's expense - it's obsessed with house prices, immigrants, cancer scares and that. And doesn't Richard Littlejohn write for it?




Hang on, is that the Daily Express?







Having said that, theatre is all about the challenges, and a play that seems to celebrate the plucky British spirit in the face of World War II is so unexpected, I am thrilled. The Picture House was devised by a group of students at Mountview Academy; the action begins in 1939, when a new cinema is opened in Yorkshire and becomes the pride of the community. Through all new songs and dances, the tribulations of WWII and the titular building are sketched as... I have to admit that this isn't my kind of thing, because I am a miserable pessimist with a typical pseudo-intellectual cynicism about patriotic feelings. And musicals. However, it has a cast of thirteen, plus band and gets away from the sort of po-faced seriousness that I call art.




















theSPACE on North Bridge (v. 36) 3rd-4th Aug (Previews) 6th-18th Aug @ 6:20pm



























Being properly confused by the idea of a musical about war, I spoke to Michael Wilkinson from Revolution! The Musical. Billed as a politically appropriate staging in the wake of the Arab Spring, it goes back to the 1993 Bosnian battles.






"Musicals have never been more relevant, especially British ones," he explains. "We all seem to have a real appetite for them these days. At last though the Lloyd-Webber stranglehold on musical theatre is being dismantled and emerging and relevant musicals like ours are catching the public eye for the first time."






"When we first set out writing the show we had no idea that the Arab Spring was just around the corner. But just months down the line we soon found ourselves being surrounded by headlines coming out of Egypt, Libya and now Syria. The show is set in Bosnia in 1993 but the parallels are simply astonishing. We hope that this is going to make us one of the most topical shows out there at the Fringe in 2012."
















Revolution's composer Nicholas Keyworth added: "One of the great things about the musical as a genre is that it can contain an eclectic range of musical styles which know no bounds. In our case this ranges from epic, classical moments to traditional Balkan music, show-stopping blues, jazz and razzmatazz to 1990s turbo-folk."










Paradise in Augustine’s (Venue 152) 6-27 August 8.25pm (excl. 13 & 20)






Back to my inbox, with a vague feeling that my original project - to discover whether war could be depicted on stage with accuracy and meaning - is in ruins. I am tempted to give up and mention Allo Allo, Practical Magic's live version of the Lloyd and Croft sitcom (Spotlites@The Edinburgh Fringe, 4th – 11th August, 2012), but I am clinging to my hope that there is a work that brings it all back home...



If I go back in time, I turn up a possible trump. Everything I Own presents Rémy, set during the Napoleonic Wars. It does have a love story - I guess that is inevitable, and a hint of hope but it is a one person show, written and performed by East 15 graduate Claire Gaydon. Plus it is set in a prison and is in the Vault at St Augustines, which makes it site relevant, if not specific!
















Remy is inspired by Napoleon and his story leads him through Europe - he sees the first use of guerilla warfare, which is now so popular amongst insurgents, the charisma of the totalitarian leader and tells the tale of those broken by the mad grab for power. There's a sense here that history can teach us lessons and that the reality of war and political greed does not change across time...










And I am rather keen on the idea of a woman telling the story of a man. It has that "magic of theatre" vibe, where the illusion is obvious but powerful...














Paradise in The Vault4th – 5th Aug 8:45pm (previews) 6th – 27th Aug (not 15th, 30th) 5pm.










I am on the home straight now... and thank God for Freshblood Theatre. They are doing a mash-up of two Brecht texts - How Much Is Your Iron? - the explores the build up towards WWII in the way only that German fourth-wall smasher can.


The plot is nicely pitched between allegory and realism: Dansen has pigs, his neighbour Svendson is an iron trader. Then people start to get murdered, a mysterious stranger rolls up and Freshblood got out the puppets, went for the dark laughter and won the Warwick Clive Barker Award in 2011.


The company are from Warwick University, and have a reputation for both cabaret shows and some neat satires - Vile Bodies is on their list of past shows, so I like them already.


The promise of a "new" Brecht is bold, but the style looks intact: the mundane and the mythical, the bleak humour, the willingness to use whatever helps get the message across. It's another young company, so it's a relief to find that there is still a market for tough theatrical choices and the heritage of Germany's master maker.



Sweet Grassmarket, Apex International Hotel, Venue 18 Aug 11th-17th@14:25