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9 results

  • Chapter 2 - Models for Epic Theater from the Munich Years:

  • from Part I - Brecht’s World
  • Edited by Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Bertolt Brecht in Context
    Published online:
    28 May 2021
    Print publication:
    10 June 2021, pp 26-33

  • Summary

    During his time as a young artist in Munich (1917–1924), Brecht’s burgeoning approach to drama and theater was considerably influenced by the playwright and cabaret performer Frank Wedekind and the Bavarian comedian Karl Valentin. This chapter outlines the nature of Brecht’s contact with these two artists and their performance work, and demonstrates how their aesthetic approaches had a significant impact on the development of his epic theater. In particular, it attends to how both artists provided compelling strategies for defamiliarizing material realities and societal oppression. While Wedekind offered enthrallingly deviant protagonists and repurposed popular art forms – cabaret, circus and the Moritat, Valentin’s clowning and fairground style inducted Brecht in the deployment of gestic performance and comic incongruity. What the chapter makes apparent is the extent to which these artists provided Brecht with key models for a subversive theater that recycled old and new, popular and highbrow forms in order to deliver a social commentary that was richly satirical and fun.

  • Brecht Studies Stanislavski: Just a Tactical Move?

  • Meg Mumford
  • Journal:
    New Theatre Quarterly / Volume 11 / Issue 43 / August 1995
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    15 January 2009, pp. 241-258
    Print publication:
    August 1995

  • In the 'fifties Brecht undertook an examination of Stanislavski's theatre which in terms of breadth and intensity was unprecedented in his career – and rehearsal documentation from that period testifies that he incorporated some of Stanislavski's methods into the stage practice of the Berliner Ensemble. The seriousness of his study is attested by the organized collection of notes on the production of Katzgraben recently discovered in Elizabeth Hauptmann's estate. Brecht's preoccupation with Stanislavski at this time has been seen as an attempt to protect his theatre's existence in an environment where Stanislavski, socialist realism, and the communist cause were regarded as interlinked. In this paper, Meg Mumford, recently appointed to a lectureship in theatre in the University of Glasgow, outlines the nature of Brecht's study of Stanislavski, and draws upon the records of the ensuing theatre practice, the Katzgraben notes in particular, to illuminate Brecht's growing recognition of affinities with Stanislavski's methods, which he found useful in fostering the young Berliner Ensemble and in creating performances he viewed as appropriate to audiences in the GDR.