Epic Theatre

 

Epic theatre is a form of drama developed in Germany in the 1920’s, in which the presentation of ideas was central. It used unconventional devices, such as the chorus, placards, narration, film and music to create a theatre emphasising a response of thought rather than emotion. Its most notable exponent was Bertolt Brecht, best known for “Mother courage and her children”.

 

  The term epic theatre used by Brecht for the first time in 1926, did not originate with him.  Picastor was the pioneer of the epic theatre, while Bertolt Brecht perfected it. Other playwrights and composers have been labelled like as epic playwrights were Stravinsky, Pirandello, Claudel, and others.

 

  To encourage the audience to adopt a more critical attitude to what was happening in the stage, Bretch developed the “alienation effect”. The alienation effect consists in the use of anti-illusive techniques to remind the spectators that they are in the theatre watching an illusion of reality. Such techniques includes 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 and 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. From his actors Brecth demanded not realism and identification with the role but an objective style of playing, to become in a sense detached observers.

 

  The technical advances were enough to permit the stage to incorporate an element of narrative in its dramatic productions. The possibility of projections, the greater adaptability of the stage due to mechanization; all complete the theatre.

 

 

   “Mother Courage and her children”, the play’s primary small businesswoman, living off of the war with her canteen wagon. Courage’s commitment to the business of war will cost her children, the war taking back for what it has provided her in flesh. This play also remarks that war makes the human virtues fatal even of his possessors. Telling each of her children’s fortunes, Courage will conjure their deaths at the hand of their respective virtues: bravery, honesty and kindness. As the name of its eponymous heroine suggests, Mother Courage poses the tradition of the morality play is conventionally organized around Everyman as its protagonist and various characters personifying Vices and Virtues. Action consists of their struggle, whether for the Everyman's soul or otherwise. Similarly Mother Courage offers Courage and her children as sense personifications the virtues that do them in during the war: wisdom, bravery, honesty, and kindness. Obviously, it is also profoundly pedagogical in its intentions. Despite these similarities, it is clear that Brecht fundamentally departs from the morality play tradition as well. Certainly Courage is no Everyman. Moreover, the epic form militates precisely against a structure of ready identification between spectator and character that the universal Everyman clearly establishes. In the morality play, we are all "Everyman."   

 

  For conclusion, we talk about the influence of the epic theatre, especially the Brecht’s theatre. Brecht’s attack on the illusive theatre influenced, directly or indirectly, the theatre of every Western country. In Britain the effect became evident in the work of such playwrights as John Arden and Edward Bond and in some of the bare-stage production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Western theatre in the twentieth century, however has proved to be a cross-fertilization of many styles (Brecht’s himself acknowledged to oriental theatre) and by 1950’s other approaches were gaining influence.