Brecht :: essays research papers

     It is difficult to imagine a play which is totally successful in portraying drama as Bertolt Brecht envisioned it to be. For more years before and since Brecht proposed his theory of Epic atomic number 18a, writers, directors and performers have been focus on the vitality of entertaining the sense of hearing, and creating characters with which the spectator can empathize. Epic firm believes that the actor-spectator relationship should be one of distinct separation, and that the spectator should learn from the actor rather than relate to him. Two contemporary plays that have been written in the last thirty years which examine and work with Brechtian ideals are Fanshen by David Hare, and The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman. The question to be examined is whether either of these two plays are entirely successful in achieving what was later called, The Alienation Effect.      over the course of his career, Brecht developed the crite ria for and conditions needed to create Epic Theatre. The role of the audience can be likened to that of a group of college aged students or intellectuals. Brecht believed in the intelligence of his audience, and their capacity for critical analysis. He detested the trance-like extract that an Aristotelian performance can lure the audience into. Plays that idealize life and valet de chambre are appealing to an audience, and this makes it easy for them to identify with the hero, they reach a state of self oblivion. The spectator becomes one with the actor, and experiences the same fantastical climax that is undoable in real life.     However, at the end of the performance, the audience has already experient the      highest emotional climax, the memory of which is strung along by the inevitable       plot of ground resolution. The audience has no choice but to leave with the rapidly fade      memory of their dramatic stimulation and return to the underwhelming reality that      awaits them outside of the theatre. "The labour of epic theatre, Brecht believes, is not so much to develop actions as to consist conditions. But to represent does not here signify reproduce in the sensed used by theoreticians of Naturalism. Rather, the first point at love is to uncover those conditions. (One could just as well say to make them foreign(Benjamin 1966, 18-9)"The art of epic theatre consists in arousing astonishment rather than EMPATHY." (Benjamin 1966,16) Theatre consists in this in making live representations of reported or invented happenings in the midst of human beings and doing so with a view to entertainment.