Lecture:  "Modernism in Theatre"

The Features of a Modernist Text

1.  A classical text "effaces the medium," while a modernist text "lays bare the device."

2.  A classical narrative is high disclosure (it gives you most of the information you need to reconstruct the story out of the plot), while a modernist narrative is low disclosure (makes you do work to reconstruct one possible story out of the plot).

3.  Classical narratives feature unquestionably reliable narrators, while modernist narratives question how we can know the truth by privileging unreliable narrators.

4.  A classical narrative seals off the diegesis from the meta-diegetic world, while the modernist narrative breaks the hermetically-sealed diegesis.

Modernist in the Theatre:  The Case of Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht, whose aesthetic and ideological theories on the nature of theatre would come to revolutionize this art form, was born into a German middle-class family. He would reject these origins and become the most prominent Marxist in the history of Western theatre. Brecht’s early plays, produced during the interwar years in Weimar Germany, include The Threepenny Opera (1928) and The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny (1927). This latter play is the one that Brecht makes reference to in the essay that you’ve read for today. These plays were produced in collaboration with Kurt Weill, who wrote the music to accompany Brecht’s dialogue; the collaboration between Brecht and Weill represents one of the most productive collaborations in the history of the theatre.

In 1933, Brecht fled Germany when Adolph Hitler and the Nazis took power. During the late 1930s, Brecht wandered around Europe, producing more masterworks in the history of theatre, including Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), an intense critique of war set during the Thirty Wars’ War. Between 1941 and 1947, Brecht lived in Hollywood, periodically working on films. For example, he collaborated with Fritz Lang on Hangmen Also Die (1943), a Hollywood film about the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. In 1947, Brecht wrote The Life of Galileo, using Galileo’s persecution by the Catholic Church as an allegory for his own persecution at the hands of capitalist culture. In 1947, Brecht was called before the anti-communist witchhunting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he delivered a masterpiece of deceptive rhetoric, convincing the committee that he was fully cooperating with their endeavor. Brecht, a devout Leftist, immediately fled the country and settled in East Berlin. Brecht lost the support of many left-leaning thinkers in the West in the 1950s when he sided with the repressive pro-Soviet East German government in its brutal silencing of a political uprising.

The Features of Brecht’s Theatre

Brecht revolutionized theatre at both the aesthetic and ideological levels. For Brecht, these two levels are intricately bound together. A theatre made by the middle- and upper-classes would produce aesthetic practices meant to support the political status quo. For example, the so-called realist theatre of the late 19th and early 20th centuries would rely on a theatrical system (what Brecht calls the apparatus) meant to entertain and passify its paying audience members. Brecht believed that the classical theatre that we’ve been studying all along this semester was fully supporting an oppressive class system through both its aesthetic and ideological practices. In his essay, "The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre," Brecht calls this classical theatre, "dramatic theatre," and attempts to define its opposite, what Brecht calls, "epic theatre." For Brecht, Epic Theatre is the antidote to a pro-status quo classical theatre. In his chart on page 37, Brecht outlines the features which Epic theatre uses to topple the dramatic, or classical, theatre.

1. Whereas the dramatic theatre attempts to suck the spectator into an emotionally-moving drama, the epic theatre allows the spectator to watch at an emotional distance, judging the ideological nature of the material with a rational distance. This is the process in Brecht commonly referred to as alienation. Brecht emphasizes aesthetic practices which alienate the spectator, making him or her think about the material rather than being emotionally enamored of the characters and the plot. Brecht uses such aesthetic devices as characters stepping out of character to directly address the audience, placards and other forms of writing which analyze the plot material, and songs which comment upon the dramatic events. These songs play a prominent role in what Brecht calls the "separation of the elements," by which he means a juxtaposition between one aesthetic element (music) and another (plot and dialogue). In a classical play, these disparate elements would all be under the service of the plot. The classical play emphasizes plot to suck the audience into an emotional rapport with the characters and their plight. Epic theatre intends to sabotage this relationship so that the spectators are made to think about the plot material with which they are being presented. One way of doing this is by having one aesthetic element (a song) comment upon another element (the plot). This is what Brecht means by the separation of elements, and how it applies to producing a more intellectually-engaged and active spectator.

2. Brecht’s plays tend to be constructed out of a large number of scenes, whose relationship to one another is sketchy. This is the "one scene makes another" vs. "each scene for itself" item on Brecht’s chart. This is Epic Theatre’s direct attack on the classical Aristotelian principles of narrative construction. That is, Aristotle claims that the well-made plot is a chain of events linked by logical cause and effect. Brecht rejects this logic, claiming that it merely results in spectators being sucked into an emotional desire to see the characters’ lives resolve happily rather than being encouraged to see the underlying social forces that place these characters into these situations in the first place. This scene-intensive plot construction is one of Brecht’s most important contributions to the history of 20th Century theatre. For example, Tony Kushner uses Brechtian rapid shuttling between huge numbers of scenes in Angels in America. This is one of the elements that makes Kushner’s play so Brechtian.

3. Brecht’s last item on his chart--"feeling" vs. "reason"--effectively summarizes all that I have said above. While the dramatic theatre attempts to suck a spectator into emotionally caring for the plight of the characters, Brecht attempts to distance the spectator from the action so that an intellectual post-mortem on the events can be engaged in. This is why, on page 39, Brecht asks of the Epic Theatre, "Can we persuade them [spectators] to get out their cigars?" By this "cigar-smoking theatre," Brecht envisions, not a place of quiet and intense concentration on the play, as in classical theatre (Will Hamlet succeed in avenging his father’s murder?), but a relaxed place where a spectator can pause and smoke a cigar with his or her feet up and ponder the significance of the events before him- or herself. Because of this desire, for Brecht, the play should have a clear moral attitude, what he terms the gestus (sometimes translated as the "gest"). The Epic Theatre states boldly its moral purpose. For example, The Threepenny Opera makes a direct comparison between the lives of capitalists and those of thieves. Mother Courage makes a direct link between capitalists and those who wage war.

A Case Study of a Brecht Play: The Threepenny Opera

For The Threepenny Opera (1928), Brecht and Weill adapted a 1728 musical by John Gay, entitled, The Beggar’s Opera. Brecht transforms the material into a class-based critique on the middle-class, who exploit the proletariat, working-class. This is mostly carried out through a plot line which concerns Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, a middle-class man who owns a shop which teaches people how to make money by begging. The play thus emphasizes the middle-class indifference to the plight of people starving in the streets, while at the same time satirically showing people begging in the street as mere actors trying to make money. The play works in an aesthetically very aggressive manner. Songs constantly interrupt the action, offering other plot material as well as commentary on the action. Banners and placards drop onto the set, ironizing the plot elements even further. For example, early in the play, while we are being introduced to Peachum’s shop, a board is lowered which features the words, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," thus ironically juxtaposing this platitude from the Bible with the crassly commercial Peachum, preying off of the plight of the poor and the guilt of the middle-class who give to them.

CLIP: The Threepenny Opera (G.W. Pabst, 1931): opening of film (Mack the Knife, etc.)

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This page was last updated on June 16, 2001

Questions or Comments?  Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send an e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman