Of Bertholt Brecht's First Plays example essay topic

"The world is out of joint, certainly and it will take powerful movement to manipulate it all back again". - Bertholt Brecht. This very famous quote by Bertholt Brecht was remembered throughout the world for the world was in war. Individuals in the world were going through life and social change. Bertholt Brecht was one of the chief innovators of modern theatrical techniques and he was both a poet and playwright.

His epic theatrical creations developed drama as a forum for social and idealistic causes. Brecht's imagination, artistic genius, and social views distinguish his work and life. Eugene Bertholt Brecht was born February 10, 1898 in Augsburg, Germany. Brecht was influenced by a variety of selections including Chinese, Japanese and Indian theatre, the Elizabethans (especially Shakespeare), Greek tragedy and many more. In the early 1930's, Europe was a cauldron of social and political unrest. Literature sought not to provide accurate images, but it provoked change, encouraged thought and evaluation.

Bertholt Brecht attempted to highlight the undeniable triumph of reason and knowledge to emphasise victory over authoritarian oppression. The foundations of world literature have always been based on the attitudes and values of society. Authors, playwrights and poets are influenced fundamentally by the ideologies around them which brought all of Brecht's plays to a form of social and political instruction. Bertholt Brecht did not consider drama to be a form of entertainment; however he instead portrayed important images to the people of Europe, showing them the potential for social, political and economic change. Brecht being a Marxist, he grew up in an ordinary German family; saw the progress of several regimes of European history, including the accedence of Adolf Hitler and the effects of government's ideology on people. These encounters brought Brecht to become a respected social commentator and he questioned the ideologies and views of the government.

In one of Brecht's play The Life of Galileo, the ideologies were prevalent to government in Europe at the time. It's not difficult to realise why his texts were banned from Germany not long after they became widely read. His support for the empowerment of the common man and those marginalised in society is clear, and his endorsement of socialism is outright. Rejecting the methods of traditional realistic drama, Brecht preferred a loose narrative form in which he used distancing devices to prevent the spectator from identifying with the characters on stage. Brecht's one commercial success was The Threepenny Opera, a play still subject to occasional revival.

Based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, it portrays the poor of London, living lives that are nasty, brutish, squalid, and short. Brecht's intention was to display the fundamentally evil nature of society, but his largely bourgeois audience merely took it as a reasonably accurate portrayal of impoverished existence, never questioning their own role in sustaining poverty, perhaps even feeling their ambivalent attitude towards the oppressed reinforced by the play. Brecht loathed this reaction, feeling that the play was completely misunderstood, and vowed not to repeat his mistake in creating something that the bourgeoisie society could like. Many of Bertholt Brecht's first plays were written in Germany during the 1920's; however he was not widely known until much later. Eventually his theories of stage presentation exerted more influence on the course of mid-century theatre in the West than did those of any other individuals. Brecht's earliest work was heavily influenced by German Expressionism, but it was his preoccupation with Marxism and the idea that man and society could be intellectually analysed.

This then led him to develop his theory of "epic theatre". Brecht believed that theatre should appeal not to the spectator's feelings but to his reason. While still providing entertainment, it should be strongly didactic and capable of provoking social change. In the Realistic theatre of illusion, he argued, the spectator tended to identify with the characters on stage and become emotionally involved with them rather than being stirred to think about his own life.

To encourage the audience to adapt a more critical attitude to what was happening on stage, Brecht developed his Verfremdungs-effect ("alienation effect") -- i. e., the use of anti-illusive techniques to remind the spectators that they are in a theatre, watching an enactment of reality instead of reality itself. Such techniques included: flooding the stage with harsh white light, regardless of where the action was taking place; and leaving the stage lamps in full view of the audience; making use of minimal props; "indicative" scenery; intentionally interrupting the action at key junctures with songs in order to drive home an important point or message; and projecting explanatory captions onto a screen or employing placards. Some techniques of Brecht's staging included music as an important part of the performance; actors whose songs were intended to narrate rather than emote; an overt moral purpose to the production underscored by clear and "realistic" physical acting. Brecht insisted that actors demonstrate their social attitudes through the physical disposition of their bodies. Brecht's special lexicon (theatrical jargon) is confusing as he invented a complex language to describe essentially straightforward ideas - this lexicon includes such terms as epic-theatre, non-Aristotelian drama and so on. Three-dimensional set pieces, machinery, revolving stage, and lighting often used to trick the audience.

Brecht's most important plays, where some such as Leben des Galilei (The Life of Galileo), Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children), and Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechuan). These plays were written between 1937 and 1945 when he was in exile from the Nazi regime, first in Scandinavia and then in the United States. At the invitation of the newly formed East German government, when he returned and found the Berliner Ensemble in 1949 with his wife, Helene Weigel, as leading actress. It was only at this point, through his own productions of his plays, that Brecht earned his reputation as one of the most important figures of 20th-century theatre. Typically, Brecht's work deals with guileless individuals faced by implacably evil society. The early Brecht seems to have believed that the serene surface of society merely masked the true nature of the human character -- unbelievable brutality -- but after his conversion to Marxism, concluded that bourgeois society was responsible for the viciousness of humanity and that, once it was replaced by a socialist order, the fundamental goodness of human nature could flower.

Eugene Bertholt Brecht was and still is one of the greatest playwrights and poets known in modern theatre. Brecht transformed the foundation of world literature by creating plays that formed the people in Europe of social, political and economic change. He transformed realistic drama from a loose narrative form to another unique distancing technique called the "alienation" technique. In this technique, where he overruled the obvious, Brecht earned acceptance and reputation by such individuality. This acceptance led Bertholt Brecht to become the most important figures of the twentieth century.