Artaud et al.
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Since the late nineteenth century playwrights, directors, and theorists of all kinds have very frequently considered theater as a primary means of working toward the betterment of the human race. Whether they proposed to convey important ideas or actually effect change in the audience these writers tended to hold that the theater was the proper vehicle for such efforts because it spoke, as it were, directly to the individual sitting in the audience. Feelings could be roused, arguments could be vividly presented in verbal or visual terms, and the makers of drama could work on the individual in a setting where every effect--verbal, visual, and aural--was under the theater's control. Despite sharing the notion that the theater was the optimum setting for such communication and general notions of improving humanity, the various theories of theatrical presentation were quite different. A brief discussion of the methods of achieving social improvement favored by George Bernard Shaw, Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, and Antonin Artaud will demonstrate the variety of these conceptions and comment on the effectiveness. Despite the similarity of their ultimate goals there was little agreement on methods in these men's approaches. Bernard Shaw, for example, favored the presentation of philosophical ideas in a theater that, although he claimed his plays were utilitarian in nature, did not limit itself to realistic presentation (in terms of language or setting). His own most succe
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ctitioners of what is generally known as "epic theater," which "seeks to focus rational audience attention on the social and historical questions embodied in the performance . . . by destroy[ing] those aspects of the illusionistic theater, especially identification and suspense, that encourage loss of intellectual awareness and lulling of the critical sense" (Cameron & Hoffman 188). Piscator was the primary developer of epic theater in the 1920s and it was only later that Brecht took up these ideas and, in several ways, reinterpreted them.
Both men were strongly influenced by Marxism. Piscator's early theater was conceived of as a proletarian theater that sought to reflect the values of the Russian Revolution and Brecht "sought to establish systematic links between Marxist ideology and epic theater" (Speirs 35). They differed on a number of important points but both men essentially adhered to the claim, articulated by Brecht, that history demanded a new form of theater because "the old form of drama does not make it possible to represent the world as we see it today" as the world changes from a capitalist bourgeois society to a new socialist economy in which the working class would be dominant (quoted in Speirs 40). Piscator
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Approximate Word count = 2886
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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