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CHAPTER Two: WHAT Is A DRAMA EVENT
Walter Benjamin claims that the critical attitude of the audience is
enhanced in epic theatre by creating intervals “which tend to destroy illusion.
These intervals paralyse the audience’s readiness for empathy”.**’ Benjamin
lists songs, captions, gestural conventions as tools of creating these intervals,
and also discusses the task of the actor in crafting these. He says that in
epic theatre the actor needs “to show, by his acting, that he is keeping a cool
head”.?* Brecht explains that this can be done by the actors “refrained from
going over wholly into their role, remaining detached from the character they
were playing and clearly inviting criticism of him”.**? One of Brecht’s devices
for the actors for creating detachment is the gestus. Meg Mumford explains
that “to ‘show the Gestus’ came to mean to present artistically the mutable
socio-economic and ideological construction of human behaviour and
relations”.*** So, the actor needs to present in a detached way the general
social and ideological constructs present in the actions of a specific character
in a specific situation in a drama, and invite criticism of it.
The expected impact of this form of theatre on the audience is described
by Brecht as the following: “The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have
thought it — That’s not the way — That’s extraordinary, hardly believable
— It’s got to stop — The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are
unnecessary — That’s great art: nothing obvious in it — I laugh when they
weep, I weep when they laugh”.°*
This description and the theoretical underpinning presented above suggest
that it is the socio-political analysis embedded in the performance that ‘opens
the eye’ of the spectator, when she is shown something she has never thought
of before, she is presented with a story and its moral in a way that drives her to
want to take action against the problems portrayed. The thesis that alienation is
necessary for understanding suggests that the cognition referred to is a rational
one, based on reason. Katafiasz explains that “the rational discourse is intended
to predominate over the imaginative one. This is the only way Brecht can prise
ideology away from story. Alienation exposes the ideology by interrupting
the story and letting the world (actor) show the audience how it really is”.%*
Linking back to Ranciére, in this case the performers are ‘interpreting the world’
for the audience, the emphasis being on getting the message through rather
than recognising the audience as a partner in meaning making.
341 Walter Benjamin: What is Epic Theatre (Second version), in Anna Bostock (ed.):
Understanding Brecht, London, Verso, 1998, 21.
342 Ibid.
343 Brecht: Theatre for Pleasure, 71.
344 Meg Mumford: Bertold Brecht, Oxon, Routledge, 2009, 54.
345 Brecht: Theatre for Pleasure, 71.
346 Kate Katafiasz: Alienation is the “Theatre of Auschwitz’: an exploration of form in Edward
Bond’s theatre, in David Davis (ed.): Edward Bond and the Dramatic Child, Stoke on Trent,
Trentham Books, 2005, 31.
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