|
|
Bertol Brecht was a playwright from the late 1800’s who sought to put a message out through his theatre performances. Brecht used many dramatic devices and techniques to do this in a very different and individual process, so that the audience would not become attached to the characters he used in his scripts. Why you ask is it important for the audience to remain unattached to the characters? Using the Caucasian chalk circle as an example to explain why this is important, how its works, and what other dramatic devices Brecht uses. Original name: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, born. Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Germany. German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of regular theatre and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for Marxist causes. Brecht was, first, a superior poet, with a command of many styles and moods. As a playwright he was an hard worker, a restless piecer-together of ideas not always his own (The Threepenny Opera is based on John Gay's Beggar's Opera, and Edward II on Marlowe), a sarcastic humorist, and a man of rare musical and visual awareness; but he was often bad at creating living characters or at giving his plays tension and shape. As a producer he liked lightness, clarity, and firmly knotted narrative sequence; a perfectionist, he forced the German theatre, against its nature, to underplay. As a scholar he made principles out of his preferences, and even out of his faults. Brecht was opposed to Aristotelian drama and its attempts to attract the Audience into a total identification with the hero, resulting in feelings of terror and pity and, ultimately, an emotional bond. Brecht didn't want his audience to feel emotions, but instead to think. Brecht argued that plays should not try to make the audience believe in or identify with the characters on the stage; instead, a play should follow the method of epic poetry, which is to make the audience realize that what it sees on the stage is merely an account of past events that it should watch with critical detachment.
|
