Wooster Group and Berthold Brecht

Wooster Group’s La Didone

Some Notes on Brecht’s Alienation Effect by Jaquelyn Peters

Brecht encourages his audience to think rather than becoming over concerned with the plot. Brecht invites his audience to identify with the issues faced by the characters and not the characters themselves. The play is a form of debate rather than an illusion. Brecht’s concept of Alienation involved the idea of, ‘making strange’. He aimed to take emotion out of the production and persuade the audience to distance themselves from the make believe. He also encouraged the actors to disassociate themselves from their roles; all of this would make the political truth easier to comprehend.

In order to detach and alienate his audiences from the story and force them to concentrate on the issue or argument, Brecht used a series of techniques to make the action strange.

Setting stories in unfamiliar locations, in different times.

Use of a chorus to sing the story, as well as narrators who were completely outside of the action.

Unrealistic speech, masks.

Diagetic and non-diagetic music.

Visible stage machinery.

Scene by scene summary of the action often using large signs.

Acting in the third person as well as actors sitting in the audience when not in a scene.

Most importantly Brecht used a technique called, ‘Breaking down the fourth wall’. This meant that the audience was not simply a spectator, but instead became mentally involved in the issues presented {Stephen Berkoff}.

Stage/mis-en-scène

Brightly lit at all times, no need for mood lighting.

No elaborate props, use of placards with instructions written on them.

Musicians on stage and often announced before playing.

Use of non-naturalistic techniques such as montage {series of still images}.

Brecht believed that epic theatre enables the audience to see things differently to how they had originally perceived them. Therefore by seeing the ‘truth’ they can begin to change things in the real world. Furthermore, he believed that by showing the suffering of those on stage, audiences could avoid it. The suffering he portrays is political. Brecht’s ideology is consistent with Marxism in that all human evil is a result of unjust social institutions.

Brecht no longer wanted audiences to be reduced to passivity but instead to be awakened to the truth of what he believed to be a highly formulated and constructed society.