“... at the heart of stage theory and practice Brecht lies the "alienation effect" (Verfremdungseffekt), which is easily confused with the etymologically close "alienation" (Entfremdung) Marx.
To avoid confusion, it is most convenient to illustrate the effect of alienation on the example of a theatrical production, where it occurs on several levels at once:
1) The plot of the play contains two stories, one of which is a parabola (allegory) of the same text with a deeper or "modern" meaning; often Brecht takes well-known subjects, pushing "form" and "content" in an irreconcilable conflict.
3) Plastic informs about the stage character and his social appearance, his attitude to the world of work (gestus, “social gesture”).
4) Diction does not psychologize the text, but recreates its rhythm and theatrical texture.
5) In acting, the performer does not reincarnate as the character of the play, he shows him, as it were, at a distance, distancing himself.
6) Rejection of the division into acts in favor of the "montage" of episodes and scenes and of the central figure (hero), around which the classical dramaturgy was built (decentred structure).
7) Appeals to the audience, zongs, changing the scenery in full view of the viewer, the introduction of newsreels, titles and other "comments on the action" are also techniques that undermine the stage illusion. Patrice Pavy, Dictionary of the theatre, M., Progress, 1991, p. 211.
Separately, these techniques are found in the ancient Greek, Chinese, Shakespearean, Chekhov theater, not to mention the contemporary productions of Brecht by Piscator (with whom he collaborated), Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Eisenstein(of which he knew) and agitprop. Brecht's innovation lay in the fact that he gave them a systematic, turned into a dominant aesthetic principle. Generally speaking, this principle is valid for any artistic self-reflexive language, a language that has achieved "self-consciousness". With regard to the theater, we are talking about a purposeful "exposing the reception", "showing the show".
The political implications of “alienation,” as well as the term itself, did not arrive immediately at Brecht. Acquaintance (through Karl Korsch) with Marxist theory and (through Sergei Tretyakov) with the "strangeness" of the Russian Formalists was required. But already in the early 1920s, he took an uncompromising position in relation to the bourgeois theater, which has a soporific, hypnotic effect on the audience, turning it into a passive object (in Munich, where Brecht began, then National Socialism was gaining strength with its hysteria and magical passes towards Shambhala). He called such a theater "cooking", "a branch of the bourgeois drug trade."
The search for an antidote leads Brecht to comprehend the fundamental difference between the two types of theater, dramatic (Aristotelian) and epic.
Drama theater seeks to subdue the emotions of the viewer, so that he “with his whole being” surrenders to what is happening on the stage, having lost the sense of the boundary between the theatrical performance and reality. The result is a cleansing of affects (as under hypnosis), reconciliation (with fate, fate, "human destiny", eternal and unchanging).
The epic theater, on the contrary, should appeal to the analytical abilities of the viewer, arouse doubt and curiosity in him, pushing him to realize the historically determined social relations behind this or that conflict. The result is a critical catharsis, awareness of inconscience (“the auditorium must be aware of the unconsciousness reigning on the stage”), the desire to change the course of events (no longer on the stage, but in reality). Brecht's art absorbs the critical function, the function of metalanguage, which is usually assigned to philosophy, art history or critical theory, becomes the self-criticism of art - the means of art itself.
Skidan A., Prigov as Brecht and Warhol rolled into one, or Gollem-Sovieticus, in Collection: Non-canonical classic: Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov (1940-2007) / Ed. E. Dobrenko and others, M., "New Literary Review", p. 2010, p. 137-138.
The Berlin Opera is the largest concert hall in the city. This elegant minimalist building appeared in 1962 and was designed by Fritz Bornemann. The previous opera building was completely destroyed during World War II. About 70 operas are staged here every year. I usually go to all productions of Wagner, whose extravagant mythical dimension is fully revealed on the stage of the theater.
When I first moved to Berlin, my friends gave me a ticket to one of the performances at the Deutsches Theatre. Since then it has been one of my favorite drama theatres. Two halls, a varied repertoire and one of the best acting troupes in Europe. Each season the theater shows 20 new performances.
Hebbel am Ufer is the most avant-garde theater where you can see everything except classical productions. Here, the audience is involved in the action: they are spontaneously invited to weave lines into dialogue on stage or to scratch on turntables. Sometimes the actors don't take the stage, and then the audience is invited to go through a list of addresses in Berlin to catch the action there. HAU has three venues (each with its own program, focus and dynamics) and is one of the most dynamic contemporary theaters in Germany.
Bertolt Brecht is the largest representative of German literature of the 20th century, an artist of great and multifaceted talent. He wrote plays, poems, novels. He is a theatrical figure, director and theorist of the art of socialist realism. Brecht's plays, truly innovative in their content and form, have bypassed the theaters of many countries of the world, and everywhere they find recognition among the widest circles of spectators.
Brecht was born in Augsburg, into a wealthy family of a paper mill director. Here he studied at the gymnasium, then studied medicine and natural sciences at the University of Munich. Brecht began writing while still in high school. Beginning in 1914, his poems, stories, and theater reviews began to appear in the Augsburg newspaper Volksvile.
In 1918 Brecht was drafted into the army and served for about a year as a nurse in a military hospital. In the hospital, Brecht heard stories about the horrors of war and wrote his first anti-war poems and songs. He himself composed simple melodies for them and, with a guitar, clearly pronouncing the words, performed in the wards in front of the wounded. Among these works, especially stood out "Bal-lad about a dead soldier” condemning the German military, which imposed war on the working people.
When the revolution began in Germany in 1918, Brecht took an active part in it, although and did not quite clearly imagine its goals and objectives. He was elected a member of the Augsburg Soldiers' Council. But the news of the proletarian revolution made the greatest impression on the poet. in Russia, on the formation of the world's first state of workers and peasants.
It was during this period that the young poet finally broke with his family, their class and "joined the ranks of the poor".
The result of the first decade of poetic creativity was Brecht's collection of poems "Home Sermons" (1926). Most of the poems in the collection are characterized by deliberate rudeness in depicting the ugly morality of the bourgeoisie, as well as hopelessness and pessimism caused by the defeat of the November Revolution of 1918
These ideological and political features of Brecht's early poetry characteristic and for his first dramatic works -- "Baal","Drums in the Night" and others. The strength of these plays is in sincere contempt and condemnation of bourgeois society. Recalling these plays in his mature years, Brecht wrote that in them he "without regrets showed how the great flood fills the bourgeois world".
In 1924, the famous director Max Reinhardt invites Brecht as a playwright in his theater in Berlin. Here Brecht converges With progressive writers F. Wolf, I. Becher, with the creator of the workers' revolutionary theater E. Piscator, actor E. Bush, composer G. Eisler and others close to him on spirit of artists. In this setting, Brecht gradually overcomes his pessimism, more courageous intonations appear in his works. The young dramaturg creates topical satirical works in which he sharply criticizes the social and political practices of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Such is the anti-war comedy "What is that soldier, what is that" (1926). She is written at a time when German imperialism, after the suppression of the revolution, began vigorously to restore industry with the help of American bankers. reactionary elements together with the Nazis, they united in various "bunds" and "fereyns", propagated revanchist ideas. Theatrical stages were more and more filled with sugary edifying dramas and action films.
Under these conditions, Brecht consciously strives for art that is close to the people, art that awakens the consciousness of people, activates their will. Rejecting the decadent drama that leads the viewer away from the most important problems of our time, Brecht advocates a new theater designed to become an educator of the people, a conductor of advanced ideas.
In the works "Towards a Modern Theatre", "Dialectics in the Theatre", "On Non-Aristotelian Drama" and others, published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Brecht criticizes contemporary modernist art and sets out the main provisions of his theory "epic theatre." These provisions relate to acting, building dramatic works, theatrical music, scenery, the use of cinema, etc. Brecht calls his dramaturgy "non-Aristotelian", "epic". This name is due to the fact that the usual drama is built according to the laws formulated by Aristotle in his work “Poetics” and requiring the actor to get used to the character emotionally.
Brecht makes reason the cornerstone of his theory. "Epic theater," says Brecht, "appeals not so much to feeling as to the mind of the spectator." The theater should become a school of thought, show life from a truly scientific standpoint, in a broad historical perspective, promote advanced ideas, help the viewer understand the changing world and change himself. Brecht emphasized that his theater should become a theater “for people who have decided to take their fate into their own hands”, that he should not only reflect events, but also actively influence them, stimulate, awaken the viewer’s activity, make him not to empathize, but to argue, to take a critical position in the dispute. At the same time, Brecht by no means abandons the desire to influence feelings and emotions as well.
To implement the provisions of the “epic theater”, Brecht uses in his creative practice the “effect of alienation”, that is, an artistic technique, the purpose of which is to show the phenomena of life from an unusual side, to force people in a different way look at them, critically evaluate everything that happens on the stage. To this end, Brecht often introduces choirs and solo songs into his plays, explaining and evaluating the events of the performance, revealing the ordinary from an unexpected side. The “alienation effect” is also achieved by the acting system, stage design, and music. However, Brecht never considered his theory finally formulated and until the end of his life he worked on its improvement.
Acting as a bold innovator, Brecht at the same time used all the best that had been created by the German and world theater in the past.
Despite the controversy of some of his theoretical positions, Brecht created a truly innovative, combative dramaturgy, which has a sharp ideological orientation and great artistic merit. By means of art, Brecht fought for the liberation of his homeland, for its socialist future, and in his best works he appeared as the largest representative of socialist realism in German and world literature.
In the late 20's - early 30's. Brecht created a series of "instructive plays" that continued the best traditions of the working theater and were intended to agitate and propagate progressive ideas. These include "The Baden Instructive Play", "The Supreme Measure", "The Saying "Yes" and the Saying "No", etc. The most successful of them are "Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouse" and the staging of Gorky's "Mother".
During the years of emigration, Brecht's artistic skill reaches its peak. He creates his best works, which were a great contribution to the development of German and world literature of socialist realism.
The satirical play-pamphlet Round-Headed and Sharp-Headed is a vicious parody of the Hitler Reich; it exposes nationalist demagogy. Nor does Brecht spare the German philistines who allowed the fascists to fool themselves with false promises.
In the same sharply satirical manner, the play “Arthur Wee’s career that could not have been” was written.
The play allegorically recreates the history of the rise of the fascist dictatorship. Both plays constituted a kind of anti-fascist dilogy. They abounded with techniques of the "alienation effect", fantasy and grotesque in the spirit of the theoretical provisions of the "epic theater".
It should be noted that, speaking out against the traditional "Aristotelian" drama, Brecht in his practice did not completely deny it. So, in the spirit of traditional drama, 24 one-act anti-fascist plays were written, which were included in the collection Fear and Despair in the Third Empire (1935-1938). In them, Brecht abandons his favorite conventional background and in the most direct, realistic manner paints a tragic picture of the life of the German people in a country enslaved by the Nazis.
The play of this collection "Rifles Teresa Carrar" in the ideological relation continues the line outlined in a dramatization"Mothers" of Gorky. In the center of the play are the current events of the civil war in Spain and the debunking of pernicious illusions of apoliticality and non-intervention at the time of the historical trials of the nation. A simple Spanish woman from Andalusia fisherman Carrar lost her husband in the war and now, afraid of losing her son, in every possible way prevents him from volunteering to fight against the Nazis. She naively believes in the assurances of the rebellious generals, What do you want not touched by neutral civilians. She even refuses to hand over to the Republicans rifles, hidden by the dog. Meanwhile, the son, who was fishing peacefully, is shot by the Nazis from the ship with a machine gun. It is then that enlightenment occurs in the consciousness of Carrar. The heroine is freed from the pernicious principle: "my hut is on the edge" - and comes to the conclusion about the need to defend the people's happiness with arms in hand.
Brecht distinguishes between two types of theater: dramatic (or "Aristotelian") and epic. The dramatic seeks to conquer the emotions of the viewer, so that he experiences catharsis through fear and compassion, so that he gives himself up to what is happening on stage with all his being, empathizes, worries, having lost the sense of the difference between theatrical action and real life, and would feel like not a spectator of the performance , but by a person involved in actual events. The epic theater, on the other hand, should appeal to reason and teach, should, while telling the viewer about certain life situations and problems, observe the conditions under which he would maintain, if not calmness, then at least control over his feelings and in fully armed with a clear consciousness and critical thought, without succumbing to the illusions of stage action, he would observe, think, determine his principled position and make decisions.
To visually highlight the differences between dramatic and epic theater, Brecht outlined two sets of features.
No less expressive is the comparative characteristic of the dramatic and epic theater, formulated by Brecht in 1936: “The spectator of the drama theater says: yes, I already have that feeling too. will always be. - The suffering of this person shocks me, because there is no way out for him. - This is a great art: everything is self-evident in it. - I cry with the crying, I laugh with the laughing.
The spectator of the epic theater says: I would never have thought of this.-- This should not be done.-- It is most amazing, almost un-probable.-- This must be stopped.-- The suffering of this man shocks me, for a way out is still possible for him. - This is a great art: nothing in it is self-evident. - I laugh at the crying, I cry at the laughing.
To create a distance between the viewer and the stage, necessary for the viewer to be able to observe and conclude, as it were, “from the outside”, that he would “laugh at the crying and cry at the laughing”, that is, so that he sees further and understands more, than stage characters, so that his attitude towards the action is one of spiritual superiority and active decision. This is the task which, according to the theory of epic theater, playwright, director and actor must solve together. For the latter, this requirement is of a particularly binding nature. Therefore, the actor must show a certain person in certain circumstances, and not just be him. He must, at some moments of his stay on stage, stand next to the image he creates, that is, be not only its embodiment, but also its judge. This does not mean that Brecht completely denies "feeling" in theatrical practice, that is, the merging of the actor with the image. But he believes that such a state can only occur in moments and, in general, should be subject to a rationally thought-out and consciousness-defined interpretation of the role.
Brecht theoretically substantiates and introduces into his creative practice the so-called "alienation effect" as a fundamentally obligatory moment. He considers it as the main way to create a distance between the viewer and the stage, to create the atmosphere envisaged by the theory of epic theater in relation to the audience to the stage action; In essence, the "alienation effect" is a certain form of objectification of the depicted phenomena, it is designed to disenchant the thoughtless automatism of the viewer's perception. The viewer recognizes the subject of the image, but at the same time perceives its image as something unusual, “alienated” ... In other words, with the help of the “alienation effect”, a playwright, director, actor show certain life phenomena and human types not in their usual, familiar and familiar form, but from some unexpected and new side, forcing the viewer to be surprised, to look at it in a new way, it would seem. old and already known things, more actively interested in them. delve into and understand them more deeply. “The meaning of this technique of the “alienation effect,” Brecht explains, “is to inspire the viewer with an analytical, critical position in relation to the events depicted” 19 > /
In Brecht's Art, in all its fields (drama, directing, etc.), "alienation" is used extremely widely and in the most diverse forms.
The ataman of the band of robbers - a traditional romantic figure of old literature - is depicted leaning over the income and expense book, in which, according to all the rules of Italian accounting, the financial operations of his "company" are written. Even in the last hours before the execution, he balances the debit with the credit. Such an unexpected and unusually "alienated" perspective in the depiction of the underworld rapidly activates the viewer's consciousness, leads him to a thought that might not have occurred to him before: a bandit is the same bourgeois, so who is a bourgeois is not a bandit whether?
In the stage performance of his plays, Brecht also resorts to "alienation effects". He introduces, for example, choirs and solo songs, the so-called "songs", into plays. These songs are not always performed as if "in the course of action", naturally fitting into what is happening on stage. On the contrary, they often expressly fall out of the action, interrupt and "alienate" it, being performed on the proscenium and facing directly into the auditorium. Brecht even specifically emphasizes this moment of breaking the action and transferring the performance to another plane: during the performance of the songs, a special emblem descends from the grate or a special “honeycomb” lighting is turned on on the stage. Songs, on the one hand, are designed to destroy the hypnotic effect of the theater, to prevent the emergence of stage illusions, and, on the other hand, they comment on events on stage, evaluate them, and contribute to the development of critical judgments of the public.
All staging techniques in Brecht's theater are replete with "alienation effects". Rearrangements on the stage are often made with the curtain parted; the decoration is "hinting" in nature - it is extremely sparingly, contains "only the necessary", that is, a minimum of scenery that conveys the characteristic features of the place and time and minimum props used and participating in the action; masks are applied; the action is sometimes accompanied by inscriptions projected onto a curtain or backdrop and transmitting in an extremely pointed aphoristic or paradoxical form social meaning plots, etc.
Brecht did not see the "alienation effect" as a feature unique to his creative method. On the contrary, he proceeds from the fact that this technique is, to a greater or lesser extent, inherent in the nature of all art, since it is not reality itself, but only its image, which, no matter how close to life it may be, still cannot to be identical to her and therefore, it contains one or another measure conventions, i.e. remoteness, "alienation" from the subject of the image. Brecht found and demonstrated various “alienation effects” in the ancient and Asian theater, in the paintings of Brueghel the Elder and Cezanne, in the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Feuchtwanger, Joyce, etc. But unlike other artists, who "alienation" may be present spontaneously Brecht - the artist of socialist realism - consciously brought this technique into close connection with the social tasks that he pursued with his work.
To copy reality in order to achieve the greatest external similarity, in order to preserve its directly sensual appearance as close as possible, or to “organize” reality in the process of its artistic representation in order to fully and truthfully convey its essential features (of course, in a concrete-figurative embodied), - these are the two poles in the aesthetic problems of contemporary world art. Brecht takes a very definite, distinct position in relation to this alternative. “The usual opinion is that,” he writes in one of the notes, “that a work of art is the more realistic, the easier it is to recognize reality in it. I contrast this with the definition that a work of art is the more realistic, the more convenient it is for cognition that reality is mastered in it. Brecht considered the most convenient for the knowledge of reality conditional, "alienated", containing a high degree of generalization of the form of realistic art.
Being artist thought and attaching exceptional importance to the rationalistic principle in the creative process, Brecht always, however, rejected schematic, resonant, insensitive art. He is a mighty poet of the stage p. addressing reason spectator, looking for and finds an echo in his feelings. The impression produced by Brecht's plays and productions can be defined as "intellectual agitation", that is, such a state of the human soul in which the sharp and intense work of thought excites, as if by induction, an equally strong emotional reaction.
The theory of "epic theater" and the theory of "alienation" are the key to all of Brecht's literary work in all genres. They help to understand and explain the most essential and fundamentally important features of both his poetry and prose, not to mention dramaturgy.
If the individual originality of Brecht's early work was largely reflected in his attitude towards expressionism, then in the second half of the 1920s, many of the most important features of Brecht's worldview and style acquire special clarity and certainty, confronting the "new efficiency". Much undoubtedly connected the writer with this trend - an avid addiction to the signs of modern life, an active interest in sports, a denial of sentimental daydreaming, archaic "beauty" and psychological "depths" in the name of the principles of practicality, concreteness, organization, etc. And at the same time, much separated Brecht from the "new efficiency", starting with his sharply critical attitude towards the American way of life. More and more imbued with the Marxist worldview, the writer entered into an inevitable conflict with one from the main philosophical postulates of the "new efficiency" -- with the religion of technism. He rebelled against the tendency to assert the primacy of technology fell on social and humanistic principles life: the perfection of modern technology did not blind him so much that he did not interweave the imperfections of modern society. Before the writer's mind's eye, the ominous outlines of an impending catastrophe were already looming.
AND HERE IS THE MOON OVER SOHO
“And the cursed whisper: “Darling, cuddle up to me!”, / And the old song: “Where are you, there I am with you, Johnny”, / And the beginning of love, and meeting in the moonlight!
The play "The Threepenny Opera" is Brecht's most frank and scandalous.
Written in 1928 and translated into Russian in the same year for the Chamber Theatre. It's a remake" Beggar's Operas by John Gay written two hundred years before Brecht as a parody of operas handel, a satire on England of that time. The plot was suggested Swift. Brecht hardly changes it. But Gay's Peacham is already a clever bourgeois, and Mackey the Knife is still the last Robin Hood. In Brecht, they are both businessmen with "cold noses". The action is moved a hundred years ahead, to Victorian England.
One list of characters in the play caused an outburst of rage among respectable bourgeois. " Bandits. Beggars. Prostitutes. Constables." And - put on the same board. One remark is enough to understand what will be discussed: “ Beggars beg, thieves steal, those who walk walk. In addition, the playwright included Brown, the chief of the London police and the priest Kimble, among the characters. So the rule of law and the church in the country are "at the same time" with thieves, bandits, prostitutes, and other inhabitants of Soho. In the 19th century, the lower strata of the population lived there, among the crowdbrothels
, pubs, entertainment establishments.
"Everything, without exception, everything, is trampled down, desecrated, trampled down here - from the Bible and the clergy up to the police and all the authorities in general ... It's good that when some ballads were performed, not everything could be heard, " wrote one critic indignantly. " In this circle of criminals and whores, where they speak the language of the cesspool, reviving dark and vicious thoughts, and where the basis of existence is the perversion of the sexual instinct, in this circle they trample on everything that even remotely resembles moral laws ... In the final chorus, the actors like madmen yelling: "First bread, and then morality" ... Pah, damn it! - frankly hysterical another.
In Soviet times, the play was staged as a revealing document against the bourgeois system. There was a bright performance in the theater of Satire. I remember another, I saw it in my youth - in the theater of the Zhovtnevoy revolution in Odessa. It was a Ukrainian theater with Brecht translated, and even then I was interested in director's versions. It was not possible to enjoy the "versions". My friend and I were alone in the hall and sat so close that all the monologues, all the zongs the actors turned to us. It was very awkward - in the second act we ran away to the box.
In the post-Soviet space, "Threepenny" appears more and more often. They brought us the Mkhtov version staged Kirill Serebrennikov.It looks more like an expensive musical. Not about England in the 19th century, not about Germany in the 20s of the 20th century (which, in fact, Brecht writes about), but about Russia in the 10s of the current century, already accustomed to street spectacles A series of beggars of all stripes went straight into the hall, "getting" the owners of expensive tickets in the stalls.
So the dramatic material chosen by the master of the course, People's Artist of Russia Grigory Aredakov for the graduation performance of graduates of the theater institute, is not as one-linear as it seems. With the help of an artist Yuri Namestnikov and choreographer Alexey Zykov they create an energetic, dynamic and sharp spectacle on the stage of the Saratov drama. All the zongs of the play are played, and there are so many of them that they made up a separate volume.
Whether they need to everyone sound: firstly, it is too long (the performance, in fact, without text cuts goes for more than three hours), and secondly, sometimes too head-on. Many zongs are altered words Francois Villon, poet of the French Renaissance. Written freely, they acquire from Brecht even rough flesh. In places and in dances, vulgar notes of strippers break through ,
what the well-known theater critic so emotionally warns about Kaminskaya: « How many times, precisely for the sake of playing in the green world, for the sake of the picturesque waving of a pistol and wriggling of the sirloin parts of the body, our theaters began to stage a Brechtian masterpiece - there are countless examples».
No, the student performance is a happy exception. The plasticity of heroes - the cat plasticity of born thieves, raiders, priestesses of love - is not an end in itself, it creates the general pattern of the performance, sculpts images convexly. And only when they dance (girls - in wonderful colors, with lush frillsmini-dresses from Namestnikov), how they do it!.. With what ingenuity and elegance of the aristocrats of the London bottom... The magician Zykov could have performed the entire performance non-verbally, and we would have been happy to decipher his ciphers.
And there are also zongs, where thanks to contagious rhythms Kurt Weill jazz notes are heard (it’s not for nothing that he loved to perform the song about Mackey the Knife Armstrong).Very professional, by the way, performed. Especially by female soloists (music editors Evgeny Myakotin, Madina Dubaeva) There is also a well-twisted plot, and a friendly ensemble of extras, and memorable soloists - coldly imperturbable, accustomed to the complete subordination of those around Makhit ( Stepan Guy). Brecht wrote that he was devoid of humor. The hero really never smiles at Guy, but how much hidden irony in the mise-en-scene with the fish (which " can't eat with a knife”) and in a quarrel between Mackey's two wives, where he acts as an arbitrator, skillfully playing along with one of the wives.
Our superhero is afraid only once - when he is sent to prison a second time, and the case smells of kerosene. He has a wonderful enemy - the king of the poor Peach ( Konstantin Tikhomirov). The same cold-blooded, prudent, but more skillful in intrigues. He saves from the hands of a bandit the invested considerable "capitals" - his daughter! Polly Anastasia Paramonova adorable, but a little... a kind of pink fool. For the time being ... until she is entrusted with the real thing - to provide a "roof for the bandits." Here we will see a completely different Polly, the faithful daughter of her father, a businessman of the "shadow economy". Once at the gallows, the husband calls out to her.
“Listen, Polly, can't you get me out of here?
Polly. Oh sure.
Poppy. Of course, money is needed. I'm here with the warden...
Polly ( slowly). The money went to Southampton.
Poppy. Don't you have anything here?
Polly. No, not here".
In matters of money, sentiment is alien not only to Mack, but also to his dear little wife. " And where is their moon over Soho? / Where is the cursed whisper: "Darling, cuddle up to me"?
For some reason, paler than the short, but irresistible with a ponytail, Mackey looks like his "combat friend" in plaid trousers -Lanky Brown (Andrei Goryunov). But a worthy opponent of Polly, the destroyer of her lover who left her, will be the luxurious Jenny-Malina in a halo of flowing curls ( Madina Dubaeva).
Brecht's theater is frankly publicistic, it's all about the accents. Previously, a zong with a simple refrain was heavily accentuated : "First bread, and morality - then!". In Aredakov's performance, Captain Makhit's farewell speech will be remembered: “What is a crowbar compared to a share? What is a raid on the bank compared to the founding of the bank? » And the clarification of his accomplice Mattias at the wedding of the chief : "You see, ma'am, we are connected with major representatives of the authorities." Here's to you "moon over Soho". But nothing is new under the sun, although this truth was revealed to us in the gangster 90s.The performance turned out to be big, multifaceted, multi-figured, truly musical and spectacular. Which is already a lot for novice actors.
Irina Krainova
Brecht contrasted his theory, based on the traditions of the Western European "theatre of performance", with the "psychological" theater ("theater of experience"), which is usually associated with the name of K. S. Stanislavsky, who developed the system of the actor's work on the role for this theater.
At the same time, Brecht himself, as a director, willingly used the methods of Stanislavsky in the process of work and saw a fundamental difference in the principles of the relationship between the stage and the auditorium, in that “super task” for which the performance is staged.
The young poet Bertolt Brecht, who had not yet thought about directing, began with a drama reform: the first play, which he would later call "epic", "Baal", was written back in 1918. Brecht's "epic drama" was born spontaneously, out of protest against the theatrical repertoire of that time, mostly naturalistic - he brought the theoretical basis for it only in the mid-20s, having already written a considerable number of plays. “Naturalism,” Brecht would say many years later, “gave the theater the opportunity to create exceptionally subtle portraits, scrupulously, in every detail to depict social “corners” and individual small events. When it became clear that naturalists overestimated the influence of the immediate, material environment on human social behavior, especially when this behavior is considered as a function of the laws of nature, then interest in the “interior” disappeared. A broader background acquired significance, and it was necessary to be able to show its variability and the contradictory effects of its radiation.
The term itself, which he filled with his own content, as well as many important thoughts, Brecht drew from enlighteners who were close to him in spirit: from I. W. Goethe, in particular in his article “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry”, from F. Schiller and G E. Lessing ("Hamburg Dramaturgy"), and partly by D. Diderot - in his "Paradox about the Actor". Unlike Aristotle, for whom epic and drama were fundamentally different types of poetry, the enlighteners somehow allowed the possibility of combining epic and drama, and if, according to Aristotle, tragedy was supposed to evoke fear and compassion and, accordingly, active empathy of the audience, then Schiller and Goethe , on the contrary, they were looking for ways to mitigate the affective impact of the drama: only with a more calm observation is it possible to critically perceive what is happening on the stage.
The idea of epitization of a dramatic work with the help of a choir - a constant participant in the Greek tragedy of the 6th-5th centuries BC. e., Brecht also had someone to borrow from besides Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides: at the very beginning of the 19th century, Schiller expressed it in the article “On the use of the choir in tragedy”. If in ancient Greece this choir, commenting on and evaluating what is happening from the position of “public opinion”, was rather a vestige, reminiscent of the origin of tragedy from the choir of “satires”, then Schiller saw in it, first of all, “an honest declaration of war on naturalism”, a way of returning poetry to theatrical stages. Brecht in his "epic drama" developed another thought of Schiller: "The choir leaves the narrow circle of action in order to express judgments about the past and the future, about distant times and peoples, about everything human in general ...". In the same way, Brecht's "chorus" - his zongs - significantly expanded the internal possibilities of the drama, made it possible to fit epic narrative and the author himself into its limits, to create a "wider background" for the stage action.
Against the backdrop of the turbulent political events of the first third of the 20th century, the theater for Brecht was not a “form of reflection of reality”, but a means of transforming it; however, the epic drama was difficult to take root on the stage, and the trouble was not even that the productions of the plays of the young Brecht, as a rule, were accompanied by scandals. In 1927, in the article "Reflections on the Difficulties of the Epic Theater", he was forced to state that the theaters, turning to epic dramaturgy, are trying by all means to overcome the epic character of the play - otherwise the theater itself would have to be completely reorganized; for now, viewers can only watch “the struggle between the theater and the play, an almost academic enterprise that requires from the public ... only a decision: did the theater win this struggle not for life, but for death, or, on the contrary, is defeated,” according to observations Brecht himself, the theater almost always won.
Brecht considered the first successful experience in creating an epic theater to be the production of the non-epic Coriolanus by W. Shakespeare, carried out by Erich Engel in 1925; this performance, according to Brecht, "gathered all the starting points for the epic theatre". However, for him the most important was the experience of another director - Erwin Piscator, who created his first political theater in Berlin in 1920. Living at that time in Munich and only in 1924 moved to the capital, Brecht in the mid-20s witnessed the second incarnation of Piscator's political theater - on the stage of the Free People's Theater (Freie Völksbühne). Just like Brecht, but by different means, Piscator sought to create a "wider background" for the local plots of dramas, and in this he was helped, in particular, by cinema. By placing a huge screen on the back of the stage, Piscator could, with the help of newsreels, not only expand the temporal and spatial framework of the play, but also give it an epic objectivity: “The spectator,” Brecht wrote in 1926, “gets the opportunity to independently consider certain events that create the prerequisites for decisions of the actors, as well as the opportunity to see these events through different eyes than the characters driven by them.
Noting certain shortcomings in Piscator's productions, for example, the too abrupt transition from the word to the film, which, according to him, simply increased the number of spectators in the theater by the number of actors remaining on the stage, Brecht also saw the possibilities of this device not used by Piscator: freed by the movie screen from duties to objectively inform the viewer, the characters of the play can speak more freely, and the contrast between the “flat photographed reality” and the word spoken against the background of the film can be used to enhance the expressiveness of speech.
When, at the end of the 1920s, Brecht himself took up directing, he would not follow this path, he would find his own means of epicization of dramatic action, organic for his dramaturgy - Piscator's innovative, inventive productions, using the latest technical means, opened to Brecht the unlimited possibilities of theater in general and "epic theater" in particular. Later in The Purchase of Copper, Brecht writes: “The development of the theory of non-Aristotelian theater and the effect of alienation belongs to the Author, but much of this was also carried out by Piscator, and quite independently and in an original way. In any case, the turn of the theater towards politics was Piscator's merit, and without such a turn the theater of the Author could hardly have been created.
The political theater of Piscator was constantly closed, either for financial or political reasons, it was revived again - on another stage, in another district of Berlin, but in 1931 he died completely, and Piscator himself moved to the USSR. However, a few years earlier, in 1928, Brecht's epic theater celebrated its first big, according to eyewitness accounts, even sensational success: when Erich Engel staged The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and K. Weill on the stage of the Theater on Schiffbauerdam.
By the beginning of the 1930s, both from the experience of Piscator, whom his contemporaries reproached for insufficient attention to acting (at first he even gave preference to amateur actors), and from his own experience, Brecht, in any case, was convinced that that the new drama needs a new theater - a new theory of acting and directing.
The political theater was born in Russia even earlier than in Germany: in November 1918, when Vsevolod Meyerhold staged V. Mayakovsky's Mystery Buff in Petrograd. In the program "Theatrical October" developed by Meyerhold in 1920, Piscator could find many thoughts close to him.
The theory of "epic theater", the subject of which, according to the author's own definition, was "the relationship between the stage and the auditorium", Brecht finalized and refined until the end of his life, but the basic principles formulated in the second half of the 30s remained unchanged.
Orientation to a reasonable, critical perception of what is happening on the stage - the desire to change the relationship between the stage and the auditorium became the cornerstone of Brecht's theory, and all the other principles of the "epic theater" logically followed from this setting.
“If contact was established between the stage and the audience on the basis of empathy,” Brecht said in 1939, “the viewer was able to see exactly as much as the hero in whom he was empathized saw. And in relation to certain situations on the stage, he could experience such feelings that the "mood" on the stage resolved. The impressions, feelings and thoughts of the viewer were determined by the impressions, feelings, thoughts of the persons acting on the stage. In this report, read in front of the participants of the Student Theater in Stockholm, Brecht explained how getting used to works, using Shakespeare's King Lear as an example: for a good actor, the protagonist's anger at his daughters inevitably infected the viewer as well - it was impossible to judge the justice of royal anger, his could only share. And since Shakespeare himself shares the anger of the king with his faithful servant Kent and beats the servant of the “ungrateful” daughter, who, on her orders, refused to fulfill Lear’s desire, Brecht asked: “Should the viewer of our time share this anger of Lear and, internally participating in the beating of the servant … approve of this beating?” According to Brecht, it was possible to achieve that the viewer condemned Lear for his unjust anger only by the method of "alienation" - instead of getting used to it.
The "alienation effect" (Verfremdungseffekt) for Brecht had the same meaning and the same purpose as the "estrangement effect" for Viktor Shklovsky: to present a well-known phenomenon from an unexpected side - to overcome in this way the automatism and stereotyping of perception; as Brecht himself said, “simply to deprive an event or character of everything that goes without saying, familiar, obvious, and to arouse surprise and curiosity about this event” . Introducing this term in 1914, Shklovsky designated a phenomenon that already existed in literature and art, and Brecht himself would write in 1940: “The alienation effect is an old theatrical technique found in comedies, in some branches of folk art, as well as on the stage of Asian theater ", - Brecht did not invent it, but only with Brecht this effect turned into a theoretically developed method for constructing plays and performances.
In the "epic theater", according to Brecht, everyone should master the technique of "alienation": the director, the actor, and, above all, the playwright. In the plays of Brecht himself, the "alienation effect" could be expressed in a wide variety of solutions that destroy the naturalistic illusion of the "authenticity" of what is happening and allow the viewer's attention to be fixed on the author's most important thoughts: in zongs and choirs that deliberately break the action, in the choice of a conditional scene of action - "fantastic land ”, like China in “The Good Man from Sichuan”, or India in the play “A Man is a Man”, in deliberately implausible situations and temporary displacements, in the grotesque, in a mixture of real and fantastic; he could also use "speech alienation" - unusual and unexpected speech constructions that attracted attention. In The Career of Arturo Ui, Brecht resorted to a double "alienation": on the one hand, the story of Hitler's rise to power turned into the rise of a petty Chicago gangster, on the other hand, this gangster story, the struggle for a cauliflower trust, was presented in a play in "high style", with imitations of Shakespeare and Goethe, - Brecht, who always preferred prose in his plays, forced the gangsters to speak in iambic 5-foot.
The Alienation Technique proved especially challenging for the actors. In theory, Brecht did not avoid polemical exaggerations, which he himself later admitted in his main theoretical work - "The Small Organon" for the Theater" - in many articles he denied the need for the actor to get used to the role, and in other cases considered it even harmful: identification with the image inevitably turns the actor either into a simple mouthpiece of the character, or into his lawyer. But in Brecht's own plays, conflicts arose not so much between the characters as between the author and his characters; the actor of his theater had to present the author's - or his own, if it did not fundamentally contradict the author's - attitude towards the character. In the “Aristotelian” drama, Brecht also disagreed with the fact that the character in it was considered as a certain set of traits given from above, which, in turn, predetermined fate; personality traits were presented as “impenetrable to influence,” but in a person, Brecht reminded, there are always different possibilities: he became “like that”, but could be different, and the actor also had to show this possibility: “If the house collapsed, that doesn't mean he couldn't survive." Both, according to Brecht, required "distance" from the created image - as opposed to Aristotle's: "The one who worries himself excites, and the one who is really angry evokes anger." Reading his articles, it was hard to imagine what would happen as a result, and in the future, Brecht had to devote a significant part of his theoretical work to refuting the prevailing, extremely unfavorable for him ideas about the "epic theater" as a rational theater, "bloodless" and not having a direct relationship to art.
In his Stockholm report, he talked about how at the turn of the 20-30s at the Berlin Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, attempts were made to create a new, "epic" style of performance - with young actors, including Helena Weigel, Ernst Busch, Carola Neher and Peter Lorre, and ended this part of the report on an optimistic note: “The so-called epic style of performance developed by us ... relatively quickly revealed its artistic qualities ... Now the possibilities have opened up for turning the artificial dance and group elements of the Meyerhold school into artistic ones, and the naturalistic elements of the Stanislavsky school into realistic". In fact, everything turned out to be not so simple: when Peter Lorre in 1931 in an epic style played the main role in Brecht's play “Man is Man” (“What is that soldier, what is that”), many had the impression that Lorre played just badly. Brecht had to prove in a special article (“On the Question of Criteria Applicable for Evaluating Acting Art”) that Lorre actually plays well and those features of his game that disappointed viewers and critics were not the result of his insufficient talent.
A few months later, Peter Lorre rehabilitated himself before the public and critics by playing a maniac-murderer in F. Lang's film "". However, it was obvious to Brecht himself: if such explanations were required, something was wrong with his "epic theater" - in the future he would clarify a lot in his theory: the refusal to empathize would be softened to the requirement "not to completely transform into the protagonist of the play , but, so to speak, to remain close to him and critically evaluate him ”“ Formalistic and meaningless,” Brecht writes, “the play of our actors will be shallow and lifeless if we, teaching them, forget for even a minute that the task of the theater is create images of living people. And then it turns out that it is impossible to create a full-blooded human character without getting used to it, without the actor's ability to "completely get used to and completely reincarnate." But, Brecht will make a reservation, at a different stage of rehearsals: if Stanislavsky's getting used to the image was the result of the actor's work on the role, then Brecht sought reincarnation and the creation of a full-blooded character, so that in the end there was something to distance himself from.
The distancing, in turn, meant that the actor turned from the “mouthpiece of the character” into the “mouthpiece” of the author or director, but he could also act on his own behalf: for Brecht, the ideal partner was the “actor-citizen”, like-minded, but also enough independent, to contribute to the creation of the image. In 1953, while working on Shakespeare's Coriolanus at the Berliner Ensemble Theater, an exemplary dialogue between Brecht and his collaborator was recorded:
| P. You want Bush to play Marcia, a great folk actor who is a fighter himself. Did you decide this because you need an actor who doesn't make the character overly attractive?
B. But still make it attractive enough. If we want the viewer to get aesthetic pleasure from the tragic fate of the hero, we must put at his disposal the brain and personality of Bush. Bush will transfer his own virtues to the hero, he will be able to understand him - and how great he is, and how much he costs the people. |
Rejecting the illusion of "authenticity" in his theater, Brecht, accordingly, in the design considered unacceptable the illusory recreation of the environment, as well as everything that was excessively saturated with "mood"; the artist must approach the design of the performance from the point of view of its expediency and effectiveness - at the same time, Brecht believed that in the epic theater the artist becomes more of a "stage builder": here he sometimes has to turn the ceiling into a moving platform, replace the floor with a conveyor, the backdrop with a screen, side wings - orchestra, and sometimes transfer the playing area to the middle of the auditorium.
Ilya Fradkin, a researcher of Brecht's work, noted that in his theater all the staging techniques are replete with "alienation effects": the conditional design is rather "hinting" in nature - the scenery, without going into details, reproduces only the most characteristic features of the place and time with sharp strokes; restructuring on the stage can be demonstratively carried out in front of the audience - with the curtain up; the action is often accompanied by inscriptions that are projected onto the curtain or back of the stage and convey the essence of what is depicted in an extremely pointed aphoristic or paradoxical form - or, as in Arturo Hui's Career, they build a parallel historical plot; masks can also be used in Brecht's theater - it is with the help of a mask that Shen Te turns into Shui Ta in his play The Good Man from Sichuan.
Music in the "epic theater" from the very beginning, from the first productions of Brecht's plays, played an important role, and before The Threepenny Opera, Brecht composed it himself. The discovery of the role of music in a dramatic performance - not as "musical numbers" or a static illustration of the plot, but as an effective element of the performance - belongs to the leaders of the Art Theater: for the first time it was used in this capacity when staging Chekhov's The Seagull in 1898. “The discovery,” writes N. Tarshis, “was so grandiose, fundamental for the director's theater that was being born, which led at first to extremes, which were overcome over time. The continuous sound fabric, penetrating all the action, was absolutized. In the Moscow Art Theater, music created the atmosphere of the performance, or "mood", as they often said at that time - the musical dotted line, sensitive to the experiences of the characters, the critic writes, fixed the emotional milestones of the performance, although in other cases already in the early performances of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, music - vulgar, tavern - could be used as a kind of counterpoint to the lofty mentality of the characters. In Germany, at the very beginning of the 20th century, the role of music in the dramatic performance was similarly redefined by Max Reinhardt.
Brecht in his theater found another use for music, most often as counterpoint, but more complex; in fact, he returned “musical numbers” to the performance, but numbers of a very special kind. “Music,” Brecht wrote back in 1930, “is the most important element of the whole.” But unlike the “dramatic” (“Aristotelian”) theater, where it enhances the text and dominates it, illustrates what is happening on the stage and “paints the mental state of the characters”, music in the epic theater must interpret the text, proceed from the text, not illustrate, and evaluate, express attitude towards action. With the help of music, first of all, zongs, which created an additional "effect of alienation", deliberately interrupted the action, could, according to the critic, "soberly besiege the dialogue that had entered abstract spheres", turn the characters into nonentities or, on the contrary, elevate them, in the theater Brecht analyzed and evaluated the existing order of things, but at the same time she represented the voice of the author or the theater - she became the beginning in the performance, generalizing the meaning of what was happening.
In October 1948, Brecht returned from exile to Germany and in the eastern sector of Berlin he finally got the opportunity to create his own theater - the Berliner Ensemble. The word "ensemble" in the name was not accidental - Brecht created a theater of like-minded people: he brought with him a group of emigrant actors who played in his plays in the Zurich Schauspielhaus during the war years, attracted his old associates to work in the theater - director Erich Engel, painter Caspar Neher, composers Hans Eisler and Paul Dessau; young talents quickly flourished in this theater, especially Angelika Hurwitz, Ekkehard Schall and Ernst Otto Fuhrmann, but the stars of the first magnitude were Elena Weigel and Ernst Busch, and a little later Erwin Geschonnek, like Busch, who went through the school of Nazi prisons and camps.
The new theater announced its existence on January 11, 1949 with the play “Mother Courage and Her Children”, staged by Brecht and Engel on the small stage of the German Theater. In the 50s, this performance conquered all of Europe, including Moscow and Leningrad: “People with rich spectator experience (including the theater of the twenties), writes N. Tarshis, keep the memory of this Brechtian production as the strongest artistic shock in their life". In 1954, the performance was awarded the first prize at the World Theater Festival in Paris, extensive critical literature is devoted to it, researchers unanimously noted its outstanding importance in the history of modern theater - however, this performance, and others, which, according to the critic, have become "a brilliant application ” to the theoretical works of Brecht, many were left with the impression that the practice of the Berliner Ensemble theater had little in common with the theory of its founder: they expected to see something completely different. Brecht subsequently had to explain more than once that not everything can be described and, in particular, “the “alienation effect” seems less natural in the description than in the living embodiment”, moreover, the polemical, by necessity, nature of his articles naturally shifted the emphasis .
No matter how much Brecht condemned in theory the emotional impact on the audience, the performances of the Berliner Ensemble evoked emotions - though of a different kind. I. Fradkin defines them as "intellectual agitation" - such a state when the sharp and intense work of thought "excites, as it were, by induction, an equally strong emotional reaction"; Brecht himself believed that in his theater the nature of emotions is only clearer: they do not arise in the realm of the subconscious.
Reading from Brecht that the actor in the "epic theater" should be a kind of witness at the trial, viewers experienced in theory expected to see lifeless schemes on the stage, a kind of "speaker from the image", but they saw lively and vivid characters, with obvious signs of reincarnation, - and this, as it turned out, also did not contradict the theory. Although it is true that, in contrast to the early experiments of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the new style of performance was tested mainly on young and inexperienced, if not completely unprofessional actors, Brecht could now put at the disposal of his heroes are not only a gift from God, but also the experience and skill of outstanding actors who, in addition to the school of "performance" at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, also went through the school of getting used to other stages. “When I saw Ernst Bush in Galilee,” wrote Georgy Tovstonogov, “in a classic Brechtian performance, on the stage of the cradle of the Brechtian theatrical system ... I saw what magnificent“ Mkhatov ”pieces this wonderful actor had.”
Brecht's theater very soon gained a reputation as a predominantly intellectual theater, they saw this as its historical originality, but as many have noted, this definition is inevitably misinterpreted, primarily in practice, without a number of reservations. Those to whom the "epic theater" seemed purely rational, the performances of the "Berliner Ensemble" struck with the brightness and richness of imagination; in Russia, they sometimes really recognized the “playful” Vakhtangov principle in them, for example, in the play “Caucasian Chalk Circle”, where only positive characters were real people, and the negative ones frankly resembled dolls. Objecting to those who believed that the image of living images was more meaningful, Yuzovsky wrote: “An actor representing a doll draws a picture of an image with a gesture, gait, rhythm, turns of the figure, which, in terms of the vitality of what he expresses, can compete with a living image ... And in fact, what a variety of deadly unexpected characteristics - all these healers, accustomers, lawyers, warriors and ladies! These men in arms, with their deadly twinkling eyes, are the personification of unbridled soldiery. Or the “Grand Duke” (actor Ernst Otto Fuhrmann), long as a worm, all stretched out to his greedy mouth - this mouth is like an end, all the rest is a means in it.
The anthology included the “Papal dressing scene” from the Life of Galileo, in which Urban VIII (Ernst Otto Fuhrmann), himself a scientist who sympathizes with Galil, at first tries to save him, but in the end succumbs to the cardinal inquisitor. This scene could have been carried out as a pure dialogue, but such a solution was not for Brecht: “At first,” said Yu. Yuzovsky, “dad sits in his underwear, which makes him both more ridiculous and more human ... He is natural and natural and natural and naturally disagrees with the cardinal ... As he is dressed, he becomes less and less a man, more and more a pope, less and less belongs to himself, more and more to those who made him pope - the arrow of his convictions deviates more and more from Galileo ... This process rebirth proceeds almost physically, his face becomes more and more ossified, loses its living features, more and more ossifies, losing its lively intonations, its voice, until finally this face and this voice become alien and until this person with an alien face, in an alien voice, speaks against Galileo fatal words.
Brecht the playwright allowed no interpretation as far as the idea of the play was concerned; no one was forbidden to see in Arturo Ui not Hitler, but any other dictator who came out of the mud, and in the Life of Galileo - the conflict is not scientific, but, for example, political - Brecht himself strove for such ambiguity, but he did not allow interpretations in the field of final conclusions, and when he saw that physicists regard his renunciation of Galileo as a reasonable act committed in the interests of science, he significantly revised the play; he could forbid the production of "Mother Courage" at the stage of the dress rehearsal, as was the case in Dortmund, if it lacked the main thing for which he wrote this play. But just as Brecht’s plays, in which there are practically no stage directions, provided great freedom to the theater within the framework of this basic idea, so Brecht the director, within the limits of the “super task” defined by him, provided freedom to the actors, trusting their intuition, fantasy and experience, and often simply fixed them finds. Describing in detail the successful, in his opinion, productions, the successful performance of individual roles, he created a kind of "model", but immediately made a reservation: "everyone who deserves the title of an artist" has the right to create his own.
Describing the production of "Mother Courage" in the "Berliner Ensemble", Brecht showed how significantly individual scenes could change depending on who played the main roles in them. So, in the scene from the second act, when “tender feelings” arise between Anna Firling and Povar over the bargain over the capon, the first performer of this role, Paul Bildt, bewitched Courage by how, not agreeing with her in price, he pulled out with the edge of a knife rotten beef brisket from a garbage barrel and "carefully, like some kind of jewel, although turning his nose away from it," he carried it to his kitchen table. Bush, introduced in 1951 to play the role of a ladies' man cook, supplemented the author's text with a playful Dutch song. “At the same time,” Brecht said, “he put Courage on his knees and, embracing her, grabbed her breasts. Courage slipped a capon under his arm. After the song, he dryly spoke in her ear: “Thirty” ”. Bush considered Brecht a great playwright, but not so great a director; Be that as it may, such a dependence of the performance, and ultimately of the play, on the actor, who for Brecht is a full-fledged subject of dramatic action and should be interesting in itself, was originally laid down in the theory of the “epic theater”, which presupposes a thinking actor. “If, following the collapse of the old Courage,” E. Surkov wrote in 1965, “or the fall of Galileo, the viewer to the same extent He also watches how Helena Weigel and Ernst Busch lead him through these roles, then ... precisely because the actors here are dealing with a special dramaturgy, where the author's thought is naked, does not expect us to perceive it imperceptibly, along with the experience we have experienced , but captures with its own energy ... " Later Tovstonogov will add to this: "We ... Brecht's drama for a long time could not figure it out precisely because we were captured by a preconceived idea about the impossibility of combining our school with his aesthetics" .
