Introduction to Arika and Care (now with added alienation)

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.

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.'