Bertolt Brecht and Peter Brook

Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, and became an influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century. He made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production. During the war years, Brecht became a prominent writer of the Exilliteratur (category of books in the German language written by writers of anti-nazi attitude who fled from Nazi Germany). He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most famous plays: Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, and many others. Mother Courage is considered by some to be the greatest play of the 20th century, and perhaps also the greatest anti-war play of all time. His work attempts to show the dreadfulness of war and the idea that virtues are not rewarded in corrupt times. He used an epic structure so that the audience focuses on the issues being displayed rather than getting involved with the characters and emotions. Epic plays are of a very distinct genre and are typical of Brecht. A strong case could be made that he invented the form. From his late twenties Brecht remained a lifelong committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his "epic theatre", synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. On other side, we have Peter Brook. He is an English theatre and film director and innovator, who has been based in France since the early 1970s. Brook was born in London in March 1925, the son of two Jewish immigrants. He studied on Oxford. He directed Dr Faustus, his first production, in 1943 at the Torch Theatre in London. He made his debut in the British cinema with an adaptation of John Gay's satirical The Beggars Opera (1953). Two of Brook's most famous theatrical productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the '60s, The Marat-Sade by German modernist Peter Weiss and Shakespeare's King Lear, eventually made it into films with very much the same casts as on stage. Brook also directed two drama documentaries in Britain: Tell me Lies(1968), about British antiVietnam War sentiment in the late '60s, and Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979). Adrian Mitchels poem To whom it may concern is set to music as the opening song of Tell Me Lies: You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out, You take the human being and you twist it all about So scrub my skin with women

Chain my tongue with whisky Stuff my nose with garlic Coat my eyes with butter Fill my ears with silver Stick my legs in plaster Tell me lies about Viet Nam Tell me lies about the war Tell me lies about Afghanistan Tell me lies about Palestine Tell me lies about Cuba Tell me lies O tell me pretty little lies Tell me lies about Iraq! The influence of Brecht to Brooks work is evident, sometimes conspicuously, sometimes more subliminally, throughout Brook's production. Both had worked closely with plays of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists; both were intensely interested in oriental theatre. Brecht's interest in the Elizabethans began early, with his version of Marlowe's Edward II in 1924, and continued through the work on Coriolanus, unfinished at his death. The enduring fascination that Brecht held for oriental art began in the late twenties. In 1928 his "studio" produced Franz Jung's Heimweh, using a "new means of representation (Chinese acting rather than German)." The theatricality of the Noh stage also impressed him. Describing the set for the 1935 New York production of Die Mutter to Mordecai Gorelik, he said "Let it all be elegant, thin and fine, like Japanese banners, flimsy like Japanese kites and lanterns; let's be aware of the natural textures of wood and metal." Brook's background is equally eclectic, with his long association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, his extensive production in Iran and in Africa, and his research in India for The Mahabharata. And, like Brecht, Brook used his multicultural mix to explore new theatrical perspectives. In his verse "To Our Successors," Brecht describes the wanderings of his fragmented generation: "We went, changing our country more often than our shoes." The image of the globally mobile artist that these lines suggest is clearly epitomized in Brook, and it is his increasingly complex multicultural milieu that continues most profoundly to inform his work. When, by the mid-thirties, Brecht had developed his concept of audience alienation (Verfremdung), it was "something of a revelation" to him, "first subserving, then supplanting, the 'epic theatre' in his interests." Building on the technical sense of "epic," Brecht's idea of alienation intensified its focus, creating a specific stage environment which permitted the audience to view dramatic action in a new and more dispassionate perspective. Peter Brook reminds us that "it is out of respect for the audience that Brecht introduced the idea of alienation, for alienation is calling a halt: alienation is cutting, interrupting, holding something up to light, making us look again. Alienation is above all an appeal to the spectator to work for himself, so to become more responsible for accepting what he sees only if it is convincing to him in an adult way." Brook's brilliant staging of The Mahabharata seemed to reflect not only Brechtian influence but many elements from his earlier theatrical work as well. In set simplicity,

costuming, music, and particularly - in acting, influences were evident from the range of his productions from - Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night's Dream to Marat/Sade, The Conference of the Birds, Orghast, and The Ik. Brook's use of music was no doubt influenced by his considerable work with operawith Salome, Faust, Eugene Onegin, and Carmen - but it was also the result of extensive exposure to and research in the music of India and Java. Again, though the influences are mixed, the echo of Brecht is insistent, especially of his "gestich music". Writing on the relationship between Brecht, the theatre and the cinema, Peter Brook argued in 1960 that while, in his view, Brecht is of limited use in theatre, Brechtian aesthetics are of paramount importance to the cinema, especially in relation to new forms of documentary images. He argues that the advent of television has a great deal to do with the changing nature of spectatorship. Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company attempted to address in the stage-play US and in its cinematic adaptation Tell Me Lies, a neo-Brechtian analysis of the role played by propagandistic images of violence and atrocities with regards to the conflict in Viet Nam and a concurrent analysis of how one might intervene through the theatre and cinema. In both cases, Brook and the RSC demonstrate an acute knowledge of medium-specificity: while US reconfigures the relationship between performer, script, stage and audience, Tell Me Lies self-reflexively analyses the nature of documentary and fictional cinematic representation, spectatorship and voyeurism. The reason why Tell Me Lies is elided has a great deal to do with the fact that it was one of the first English-language films to be critical of Americas presence in Viet Nam. Regardless of how important such factors may have been in forming Brook's complex vision and method, however, the Brecht influence is also everpresent. Calling Brecht the "key figure of our time," Brook has asserted that "all theatre work today at some point starts at or returns to his statements and achievement." Much of the effect of this epic production, whether theoretic or mechanical, may be the result of Brecht's influence as it has continued to be embodied directly or indirectly in Brook's work.