Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

 Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898 in Germany and died in 1956 at the age of 58. He was a dramatist,  poet, and theatre director. Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and her Children, and The Caucasian ChalkThe circle are among his well-known works. Over the years, Brecht’s pioneering directorial approach has had a major influence on numerous directors and designers.

Brecht’s work was immensely popular in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, but he is less popular now. However, Brecht’s impact can still be seen in much of the theatre, and many say that he transformed the face of modern theatre.

Brecht was a Marxist who used his play to score political points. He aimed his theatre to arouse people’s attention to how they saw the world. He didn’t want his viewers to sit quietly and lose themselves in a show’s plot; instead, he wanted them to think about and interrogate the world around them. He inspired them to be social critics. His art was frequently sardonic, proactive, and sarcastic.

Brecht wished that his audiences stay objective and unemotional during the plays in order to make predefined threshold values about the political implications of his work. To do this, he developed a set of theatrical elements known as epic theatre.

Epic theatre is a sort of political theatre that confronts current concerns; however, Brecht preferred the term dialectal theatre later in his life. Brecht saw conventional approaches to theatre as an escape, and he was more concerned with truth and realities than escapism. Epic theater does not aim to put out a smooth storyline and narrative, instead of leaving matters unanswered and confronting the audience with often difficult issues.

The ’estrangement effect’, also known as the alienation effect, was utilized to extract the audience from the performance. Brecht tried numerous tactics to disrupt the audience’s emotional attachment to his characters because he did not want them to have any.

Mother Courage and her Children (1941)

Mother Courage and her Children is an excellent illustration of Brecht’s Epic Theatre concept. Brecht frames the play more like an epic poem than a typical Aristotelian model of theatre, which demands clearly connected action and an emotional climax at the end of the play. Through there is some sort of storyline, each scene is just loosely connected. The drama also has an uncertain, open finale; it is unknown where Mother Courage will go in the remaining years of the war. Furthermore, Brecht employs what he refers to as alienation effects to remove the spectator from the action of the play. He uses this as an alienation effect to remove the spectator from the action of the play. He uses this to limit the audience's emotional connection to the drama and its characters.

Mother Courage and Her Children is both a dark comedy and a powerful anti-war stance. The drama portrays Mother Courage as she accompanies the soldiers back and forth throughout Europe, tracking the damage as she sells supplies from her canteen cart to whatever side would grease her hand. Her children are being killed one by one in battle, but she will not give up her living- the cart. Brecht contrasts human decency against the business of war in this epic drama.

Brecht had two distinct objectives with Mother Courage: that audiences see Anna Fierling (Mother Courage) as a symbolic of an evil and unholy cabal of war and trade in which the pursuit of profit leads to irreversible loss, and that audiences become indignant at the futility of war and take action to stop its progress. Instead, they regarded Anna Fierling as a tragic heroine with a strong survival instinct.

The play’s action takes place over the period of 12 years (1624-1636) as represented by 12 scenes. One felt a glimpse of Courage’s career without having enough time to develop sentimental sentiments for or connect with any of the individuals. Meanwhile, Mother Courage is not shown as a virtuous character- here, the Brechtian epic theatre distinguishes itself from the old Greek tragedies in which the heroes are considerably above average. The climax of Brecht’s play has the same distinguishing effect since it does not stir our desire to imitate the primary character, Mother Courage.

Mother Courage accompanies the warriors from region to region and city to city, maintaining cleverness and sheer force of will through the shifting sands of political and religious loyalty. As the war progressed and she accompanied the soldiers, offering her products, she could not have been a stranger to the damage to towns and cities.

The sickness, starvation, and bloodshed that plagued the people were brought on by the war’s attack of sieges and military campaigns. In German Land, the Swedish forces alone destroyed 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages, and 1,500 cities. In the hunt for treasure, robbed, tortured, and killed people in German cities, killing one-third of the population.