Brecht

German playwright, Bertolt Brecht's ideas are very influential. He wanted to make the audience think, and used a range of devices to remind them that they were watching theatre and not real life.

Brecht was born in 1898 in Germany. During ww1 he became a medic and was appalled with the war, he didn't think it was right. He moved to Berlin in search of a career in theatre. In 1933 the nazi's came to Berlin so Brecht fled to america. He had his citizenship taken away from him by the nazi's. By 1941, he became a citizen of the united states of america. Americans did not like him at all due to the fact he was actually German. Because of this in 1947, he decided to move back to Europe  Where he created a company called, The Berliner Ensemble. From the details above we can see that Brecht lived through some very harsh times. Being forced out of Germany and America in the middle of the biggest war. Because of this, he had some very strong political views, which he liked to show through forms of theatre. He said everything how it was. He created a unique style of performance, his ideas were so revolutionary that he changed the theatrical landscape forever, he created "epic theatre", mirroring exactly what was happening in society. However he didn't want the audience to get emotionally involved with the characters, instead he wanted to make the audience think. Verfremdungseffect, its where you give the audience a chance to distance themselves from the play, so they aren't emotionally involved. However Brecht always broke the fourth rule. By talking to the audience, and reminding them chat it is just theatre and not actually real life. Which can be shown in many different ways e.g; Narration- coming out of character, speaking stage directions, directly addressing the audience, and using placards.
  
Although many of the concepts and practices involved in Brechtian epic theatre had been around for years, even centuries, Brecht unified them, developed the style, and popularized it. Epic theatre incorporates a mode of acting that utilises what he calls gestus. The epic form describes both a type of written drama and a methodological approach to the production of plays: "Its qualities of clear description and reporting and its use of choruses and projections as a means of commentary earned it the name 'epic'."

For the past week we have been studying Brecht and his work, we also are doing a small extract from the play "The Caucasian Chalk Circle", after seeing and studying Brechts work, we researched epic theatre, which is basically letting the audience know that its theatre work and not real life, for example in our piece, we label ourselves our characters names, by writing on placards who we play and sticking it to ourselves, like Brecht did. Also in our small play, we had kyle narrating everything that was going on, and we also read out the stage directions aswell.