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Brecht and the British playwright
BRECHT AND THE BRITISH PLAYWRIGHT: Stages of Action
Brecht's notice to the Berliner Ensemble in preparation for
their 1956 visit to London gives a clear indication of the problems
Brecht perceived for the British reception of his work. Apart from
obvious language difficulties, Brecht was certainly aware of the
English "long-standing fear that German art...must be terribly
heavy, slow, laborious and pedestrian." (Willett 283) and in
response to this received assumption, he directs the Ensemble to
playing that is "quick, light, strong....We must keep the tempo of
a run-through and infect it with quiet strength, with our own
fun....The audience has to see that here are a number of artists
working together as a collective (ensemble) in order to convey
stories, ideas, virtuoso feats to the spectator by a common effort"
(Willett 283). It might well be argued that much post-1956 British
political theatre has been an attempt to achieve precisely this
style of performance. Brecht certainly realized how foreign his
mode of theatre was to the British experience, and the long period
before anything more than superficially Brechtian appeared on the
British stage more than justifies his cautionary message.
In _Bertolt Brecht in Britain_, a text published to coincide
with an exhibition at the National Theatre in London marking the
twentieth anniversary of the playwright's death, Michael Kustow
declared that there were, at last, British plays which could be
acclaimed as descendants "from the didactic and demonstrative side
of Brecht's work"(6). While the plays Kustow cites, David Hare's
_Fanshen_ and John McGrath's _The Cheviot_, _the Stag_, and _the
Black, Black Oil_, clearly show an indebtedness to Brecht in their
adaptation of his dramaturgical principles for the British agit-
prop environment, political drama of the last decade reveals a more
complex and interrogatory relationship with Brechtian theory and
practice. This paper addresses Brecht's more recent influence on
British political playwrighting.
Against a background of postmodern obsession with the process
of production and reception, it is not surprising that Brecht's
work has continued to occupy a central place in British theatre,
but his dramaturgical and ideological strategies have been re-
framed to meet changing condition for political drama. As Sylvia
Harvey makes clear in a critical recovery of Brecht for film
theorists, the cultural forms Brecht produced were "appropriate for
his own times, and...times have changed" (45). The problems of
Britain in the 1980s, Harvey suggests, "provide a distinctive
framework for both our criticism and our cultural production and we
may learn something from Brecht's attempt at constructing a new
culture appropriate for his times only if we are clear about some
of the changes of approach and emphasis, together with some of the
new social phenomena, that characterize the post-war period"(46).
One re-framing of Brechtian practice can be seen in response to one
such new social phenomenon, feminism.
Much feminist drama employs the techniques of epic theatre,
but with the specific objective of showing woman's position in the
structures of power and in a context where the politics are
primarily sexual. In, for example, one of Caryl Churchill's's
early plays, _Vinegar Tom_, we can see how Brecht's theatre has
provided the crucial structure for exploring political issues, but
also how aspects of his approach have been altered in order to make
contact with an audience which shares the ghettoization experienced
by the characters of the play (and, indeed, of the actors
performing). Written in 1976, _Vinegar Tom_ might well have been
one of Michael Kustow's examples of plays from the didactic and
demonstrative side of Brecht's work. This play has an episodic
structure, a distant historical period (the seventeenth-century)
provides the main setting, contemporary songs are used to interrupt
and comment upon the main action, and, as Churchill's production
notes indicate, it is an essential feature of the play that "the
actors are not in character when they sing the songs"(69).
_Vinegar Tom_ is, of course, also the result of a collaborative
venture between Churchill and the commissioning company, Monstrous
Regiment, rather than written in isolation by the playwright alone.
The play works to distance the audience with Brechtian techniques
but for its own particular political ends; what the audience is
brought to see anew is women in social relations. A history of
injustice for women is made evident and the audience asked to
question roles held as "natural" for women in a patriarchal
society. Monstrous Regiment comment that they knew they had hit
the mark when Ned Chaillet wrote in _The Times_ that _Vinegar Tom_
presented "a picture slightly different from the one handed down
through legend and historical records (_Vinegar 73).
In Churchill's later work, and as I want to argue for British
political playwrighting generally over the last ten years,
Brechtian theory becomes less of a prescription and more of a
starting point in challenging the received assumptions of the
dominant social order. _Cloud Nine_, written by Churchill in 1979
for the Joint Stock Theatre Company, reworks Brechtian techniques
to challenge what Catherine Itzin has described as "the most deep-
seated assumptions about sexual roles and role conditioning, linked
sexual repression with capitalist oppression, related economic
imperialism to sexual imperialism" (287). Brecht's interest in
role-switching between the sexes as a technique of achieving
distance becomes in Churchill's _Cloud Nine_ the central strategy.
Not only is the dutiful Betty, wife of a macho colonist Clive,
played by a man, but the daughter by a dummy and the black servant
by a white actor. This certainly works to distance the audience
and, even more than in _Vinegar Tom_, Churchill is able to raise
questions on sexual stereotyping that is received as natural. With
Churchill's use of humor--Clive introduces the male Betty: "My wife
is all I dreamt a wife should be,/And everything she is she owes to
me." (2)--the strategy of cross-gender dressing is made even more
effective. Apart from attacking the issues of how a white, male
controlled society has oppressed women and racial groups,
Churchill's geographic location for the first Act ("a British
colony in Africa in Victorian times") is particularly important.
It is thus in the Brechtian model, a setting which is historically,
geographically and chronologically distant and it is this selection
which gives the play much of its polemic force. Seeing anew the
attitudes and values that maintained British imperialism had more
than a little relevance to a Britain which has just witnessed (and
endorsed) the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher. Churchill makes
explicit the connections Brecht contained implicitly between his
historical settings and contemporary social structures and, in this
way, she responds very directly to the election rhetoric of
Thatcher which called for a return to "solid" Victorian values and
which, in particular, looked for a renewal of the Victorian sense
of family. The second act of _Cloud Nine_ takes the connections a
step further;further as Churchill brings her characters forward 100
years to the present (although they are only 25 years older). We
see them responding, at best with perplexity, to their new-found
individual freedoms and clearly within a context that suggests that
the repressive institutions of Victorian Britain have not been too
debilitated in the course of the twentieth century.
One dilemma Churchill faced in the late 1970s, in common with
many other politically committed playwrights, was the recuperation
of her work into the institutions of bourgeois theatre. The Royal
Court in London, for example, has historically been supportive of
new writing but it is nevertheless a cultural institution which
attracts a largely, perhaps wholly, middle-class audience. In _Top
Girls_, produced at the Royal Court in 1983, Churchill brings her
Act I characters, figures from different historical periods, once
again into an explicitly contemporary setting. We see them
networking over a business lunch, part of a world where women have
achieved more than, say, Betty of _Cloud Nine_. But, as Churchill
makes evident, the progress is somewhat limited and not without
cost. What is striking about _Top Girls_ is Churchill's skillful
working of material to address the cultural codes of the audience.
In a further move from the epic model of _Vinegar Tom_, the
dramaturgy of _Top Girls_ is more sophisticated, the references
more learned, and the characterizations distinctly realist. In
this case, however, Churchill is exploiting the conventions of
bourgeois theatre practice as cultural critique. Churchill
entertains the middle-class audience with the interaction of these
remarkable women in the first act and, by the use of doubling, is
able in the later scenes to challenge our responses to the
historical figures. Furthermore, this doubling of characters
reveals a continuation of sexual oppression in contemporary social
structures.
Another playwright who has re-framed Brechtian theatre
practice to bring political drama into a more effective
relationship with the majority of the British theatre-going public
is Edward Bond. His 1979 play, _Restoration_, produced at the
Royal Court, works, like Churchill's _Top Girls_, with the cultural
training of the middle-class audience. Here it is the _langue_ of
Restoration drama which is rewritten to provoke the audience into
examining the institutions of the dominant ideology. Bond has made
it clear that while Brecht is "the most important writer of his
era," the _Verfremdungseffekt_ was a response to the "operatic
style of German theatre." He goes on to suggest that the British
experience is quite different: "Alienation is vulnerable to the
audience's decision about it. Sometimes it is necessary to
emotionally commit the audience--which is why I have aggro-effects.
Without this the V-effect can deteriorate into an aesthetic style.
Brecht becomes 'our Brecht' in the same sloppy, patriotic way that
Shakespeare becomes 'our Shakespeare.' I've seen good German
audiences in the stalls chewing their chocolates in time with
Brecht's music--and they were most certainly not seeing the world
in a new way" (34). In response to this danger, both Bond and
Churchill have developed a theatre which goes beyond mere
descendancy from the "didactic and demonstrative side of Brecht's
work." They have sought ways in which they can attack a
contemporary audience's sense of "our Brecht," where theatre
committed to the political Left becomes vogue rather than
provocative, and they bring into focus the ideological assumptions
which privilege an audience's consumption of such art. In other
words, the British writers, while looking to achieve the same aims
as Brecht, have tailored Brechtian practice to address the specific
situations of their audiences, audiences with a different cultural
baggage than those Brecht himself addressed. As Frederic Jameson
has pointed out, the _Verfremdungseffekt_ "was addressed to a
public unaccustomed to the garish stylizations of German
expressionism. But for generations which have been raised on
modernistic and stylized art and decoration and for whom such
stylization needs no defense and seems utterly natural, an inner
tension and dynamism seems to have gone out of the polemic"(90)
Yet the creation of a theatre which addressed contemporary
British audiences with anything like the effectiveness of Brecht's
work has remained problematic for the British playwright. The
post-1965 rush to "be Brechtian" certainly did not achieve an
obvious radical theatre as Steve Gooch made clear in a very
practical assessment:
So great was the confusion, it never seemed to
occur to anyone that Brecht's arguments had
been conducted largely within a proscenium
arch tradition, and that 'alienation' almost
depended on its quality of 'separation.'
Instead Brecht was embraced as ideal fodder
for production in the proliferation of end
stage, in-the-round, octagonal, three-sided
and 'environment' auditoria which sprang up
all over the country during the sixties'
theatre boom. Consequently the rigour of
Brecht's appeal to the conscious faculties of
his audience was diluted and disappeared in a
kind of osmosis between stage and auditorium(36).
Fear that, to use Jameson's words, the dynamism has gone from the
polemic brought some British left-wing dramatists to a more radical
position, confronting what they saw as a restrictive Brechtian
orthodoxy. The most vocal of these has been Howard Brenton.
In an interview with Catherine Itzin and Simon Trussler,
published in 1975, Brenton responded strongly to a question about
Brecht's influence on his work: "I'm an anti-Brechtian, a Left
anti-Brechtian. I think his plays are museum pieces now and are
messing up a lot of young theatre workers. Brecht's plays don't
work, and are about the thirties and not about the seventies, and
are now cocooned and unperformable....I think Brecht's influence is
wholly to be bad. I've never found it attractive. I've never
found it coherent"(14). Brenton has clearly tried to find a
political form for British playwrighting and has worked with the
realization described in the same interview. He states simply,
"the theatre is a bourgeois institution: you have to live and work
against that"(10). From this point, Brenton has acknowledged that
any attempts to inspire political change must be staged with a
recognition of the ideological system that supports/permits the
performance. His plays have continued to show a developed
awareness of this tension and his range of work in recent years has
shown an increasingly interrogatory examination of Brecht's theory
as well as continued and varied experimentation with modes of
polemisizing the audience. Since 1975 Brenton has written for
different media and for many different companies. This includes
British television, the Royal Court theatre, the National Theatre,
and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as
alternative/oppositional groups such as Joint Stock and Foco Novo.
He has collaborated with Trevor Griffiths, Ken Campbell, David Hare
and Tunde Ikli. Such a range of work indicates Brenton's concern
with finding forms which can communicate politically with the
widest possible audience. Beyond this Brenton has not been content
with a particular form for a particular company (and, indeed,
particular audience). Two recent plays for Foco Novo show
Brenton's diverse interests and approaches: the 1983 play,
_Sleeping Policeman_, which was co-authored with Tunde Ikoli, draws
on contemporary life in the South London district of Peckham while,
in 1984, _Bloody Poetry_ deals with the lives of Byron and Shelley.
Among all this work lies, rather surprisingly for a self-declared
anti-Brechtian, a translation of _The Life of Galileo_ for the
National Theatre, staged there in 1980. His version, though lively
and up-to-date, is a straight-forward translation of Brecht's text
but the act of translation clearly had an impact on Brenton. A
later play is the obvious descendent of his work with _The Life of
Galileo_ and indicates well this playwright's endeavors to develop
a political theatre for our times.
The National Theatre production of Brenton's translation of
_Galileo_ was given its context in the programme by a picture of
the atomic blast at Nagasaki. This illustration was captioned with
a quotation from Scene 14: "If scientists are scared off by
dictators and content themselves with piling up knowledge for
knowledge's sake, science will be crippled and your new machines
will only mean new hardships....The gulf between you and the people
will become so great that one fine day you will cry out in
jubilation over a new achievement--and be greeted by a cry of
universal horror." This visual/verbal statement becomes the
starting point for Brenton's own text, _The Genius_.
_The Genius_ was premiered at the Royal Court in 1983 and
concerns a Nobel prize winning American mathematician who, having
discovered the final enigma of nuclear physics, seeks academic
refuge in a redbrick university in the English Midlands only to
discover a brilliant young female freshman who has worked through
the same mathematics but without realizing the terrifying
implications. Not only is _Galileo_, and specifically the National
Theatre production of the Brenton translation, the starting point
for _The Genius_ but it is explicitly an intertext to the play as a
whole. This is signalled on the second page of the text when Leo
Lehrer, the American mathematician, responds angrily to a request
by the Vice-Chancellor of the English university for a joint
lecture on the marriage of Art and Science: Leo says, "They got
divorced. When Galileo sold out to the Inquisition in 1644. Three
hundred and fifty years ago. Didn't you notice?" (7).
Brechtian devices appear in this play. There is an episodic
structure and distancing devices such as the dramatic use of
lighting effects, the violin-playing skeleton, and the arresting
sight of Gilly as blind, hairless and burnt all over. It is,
however, Brenton's placing of Brecht's theatre in contemporary
socio-political relations that reveals how Brenton has moved from
"anti-Brechtian+ to a more interrogatory relationship. The central
character in _The Genius_, Leo, makes a passionate speech at the
end of Act One, directed this time at the University Bursar: "It's
trust we want from you. All of us...,like it or not--we are the
children of Galileo. And look what the old bastard's given us to
handle"(26). Brenton's feelings about Brecht might well equate
with Leo's on Galileo. In any event, _The Genius_ acknowledges
_The Life of Galileo_ as a necessary precondition to its writing,
yet attacks the play as a classic which has lost power to invoke
change because of its recuperation by capitalist culture. Brenton
in _The Genius_ takes the impetus of Brecht's work and looks for
other, contemporary strategies to bring such a politically powerful
recognition to his present day audience. The science which held
such promise in Brecht's times is present with very contemporary
conclusions. Nevertheless the Brechtian text, even in its
debilitated classical status, is important to both playwright and
audience as this conspicuously present intertext, signifying the
political impetus of _The Genius_.
Yet it is in a largely realist mode that Brenton presents his
critique of the values that maintain capitalist society. To
address the apparent opposition to Brecht's theory and practice, we
might look to Janet Wolff's examination of the social production of
art. She writes: "The techniques and styles of cultural
intervention are closely related...to the context and conditions of
its occurrence. It is not possible to say, in the abstract, that
realist or naturalist modes of representation are always wrong
(affirmative, or incorporated, or recuperable) because _realism_
may be the _only_ possible language of communication for a
particular audience" (93). Brenton apparently agrees. Like
Churchill's _Top Girls_ and many other recent British works, the
plays of Brenton use both Brechtian and realist modes of
presentation as the combination which most readily makes contact
with potential audiences. Moreover the characters of his drama,
while realist in speech and appearance, are drawn from the British
theatrical tradition of typic characterization almost to the point
of caricature. _The Genius_ contains, amongst others, a young male
student who appears as the most strident Leninist on campus only to
be revealed later as a spy for the British Government; a drunken
Vice Chancellor who eschews political responsibility by declaring
himself an arts man whose doctoral research established 24.7 images
in every 100 lines of Shakespeare; an eccentric Welshman, who
appears as a professor of Fine Art constantly travelling in and out
of scenes on his bicycle, but who is leading a double life as a KGB
agent, building a retirement home in the Soviet Union in his spare
time; and, of course, the central character is a loud, crude, and
extremely ill-mannered North American academic!
In an interview for _The Manchester Guardian_ immediately
prior to the first performance of _The Genius_, Brenton declares
that he feels more and more a "loony" in England and "a member of a
smaller and smaller constituency, the great radical tradition"(9).
This play clearly both reflects and attacks the complacency which
has overtaken even "the great radical tradition" and demonstrates
forcefully how, as Brecht showed in _Galileo_, the pursuit of
knowledge can never be divorced from its political effects.
Postwar Britain offered a new accessibility to university
education, constituted with the hope of real social change but
Brenton looks to such hope and indicates that, to all intents and
purposes, it is lost. The university of _The Genius_ is an
ineffective institution; its inhabitants are no more than agents of
the system that finances them. In a more recent play, _Pravda_
written with David Hare for the National Theatre, Brenton again
attacks power, politics and the dissemination of knowledge. In
_Pravda_, the setting is another of Britain's favourite cultural
institutions, the newspaper. Brenton's finds are very much the
same as in _The Genius_.
Throughout Brenton's work, there is a determination to provoke
an audience to see anew the workings of a system which endorses
"the great radical tradition" as a means of disarming it. To adopt
Brecht as "our Brecht" is to defuse the possibility of change. For
Brenton, who insists that playwrights can touch "life outside the
theatre" (1975 interview, 20), there is a need to go beyond the
Brechtian model. To this end, Brenton's plays use as many and as
varied styles and techniques as might create what he calls the
"bushfire" to smoulder "into public consciousness: (1975 interview,
20).
The work of Churchill, Bond and Brenton discussed here
indicates the breadth of committed playwrighting in Britain and it
is inevitable that these contemporary playwrights of the political
Left are to be considered descendants of Brecht. Churchill and
Bond have confronted the problems of relating Brechtian theatre
practice to the traditions of British theatre and, more
importantly, the assumptions of the British theatre-going public.
Brenton has moved further from the Brechtian model but has perhaps
come closer to Brecht's philosophy. In January 1986, Brenton wrote
of Brecht: "he put down markers that many of us in today's theater
have, sneakily, slipped into our pockets. He gave us a way of
busting the decayed Ibsenite drama of closed rooms and closed minds
wide open. He reinstated direct, broad, popular storytelling as
the basic art of playwrighting"(7). "Because of what he gave
witness to, it is impossible to see him as anything other than the
greatest playwright of the first half of the century. But, in the
end, I find myself saying 'Yes. The best we have, alas'" ("The
Best" 6). The once anti-Brechtian now sees Brecht as a "writer of
quests" ("The Best 6) and to continue his own quest for a theatre
which has tangible political impact, Brenton has arrived at a
relationship which both acknowledges and disputes the importance of
Brecht's work for political writers for today.
Susan Bennett
University of Calgary
NOTES
Bond, Edward. "On Brecht: a Letter to Peter Holland." _Theatre
Quarterly_ 8.30 (Summer 1978): 34-35.
Brenton, Howard. "'The Best We Have, Alas': A Note on Brecht."
_Theatre_ 17.2 (Spring 1986): 5-7.
___. _The Genius_. London: Methuen, 1983.
___. Interview. _The Guardian_. 9 Sept. 1983, 9.
___. "Petrol Bombs Through The Proscenium Arch." With
Catherine Itzin and Simon Trussler. _Theatre Quarterly_ 5.17
(Mar.-May 1975): 4-20.
Churchill, Caryl. _Cloud Nine_. London: Pluto Press, 1979.
___. _Top Girls_. London: Methuen, 1982.
___. _Vinegar Tom_. New York: Samuel French, 1982.
Gooch, Steve. _All Together Now: An Alternative View of Theatre and
Community_. London, Methuen, 1984.
Harvey, Sylvia. "Whose Brecht? Memories for the Eighties." _Screen_
23 (1982): 45-69.
Itzin, Catherine. _Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in
Britain Since 1968_. London: Methuen, 1980.
Jameson, Frederic. _The Prison House of Language_. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1972.
Kustow, Michael. Foreword. _Bertolt Brecht in Britain_. By
Nicholas Jacobs and Prudence Ohlsen. London: TQ Publications,
19/7. 5-6.
Willett, John, ed. _Brecht on Theatre_. New York: Hill and Wang,
1964.
Wolff, Janet. _The Social Production of Art_. London: Macmillan,
1981.
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