Abstract
Brecht provides a particularly useful approach to staging that we adopted during the rehearsals of Mother Courage in 2015. Arrangement is Brecht’s term for the placement of elements on the stage, in this case, the actors, to reveal narrative and gestus. It was an important step in “visually highlighting” the Drehpunkte. He differentiated between the Bühnenbildner, the scene designer who created stage pictures, and the Bühnenbauer, or scenographer, who collaborates with the other participants, including the actors, to build a scene according to the overall intent of the entire group. He preferred the latter, “Now ahead of the actor, now behind him, always together with him.” This was someone who “builds up the performance area, just as experimentally as the actors.”
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Notes
- 1.
Egon Monk, “Neher and ‘The Tutor,’” in Willett, Caspar Neher, 109. Neher didn’t design as many of the productions for the Berliner Ensemble as might be inferred here. Karl von Appen and Teo Otto also worked at the Berliner Ensemble, and the designs for the 1949 production of Mother Courage were based on Otto’s earlier work on the Zurich production.
- 2.
As Kristopher Imbrigotta notes, materials offered to the audience before the performance collected in Progammhefte, included photos from the production for this purpose. Kristopher Imbrigotta, “(Re)Building the Engaged Spectator,’ 108.
- 3.
Christopher Baugh, “Brecht and Stage Design: the Bühnenbildner and the Bühnenbauer,” in Peter Thomson and Glendry Sacks, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge: The University Press, 1994), 252.
- 4.
Baugh, “Brecht and Stage Design,” 242.
- 5.
Baugh, “Brecht and Stage Design,” 242.
- 6.
Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 1980), 1.
- 7.
Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 2.
- 8.
Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Illinois Press, 1972), 74.
- 9.
Timothy Scheie, Performance Degree Zero: Roland Barthes and Theatre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 53. At the same time, Scheie finds Barthes later writings on Brecht to be divergent: “However, a contradiction simmers between a theatre that leads a spectator to participate in history and to form committed responses that will rectify the troubling status quo, and a structural analysis intended primarily to offer an understanding of the system.” Barthes concentrates on Brecht’s “masterful deployment of signs,” rather than the latter’s politics. (ibid.).
- 10.
BOP 169.
- 11.
For this reason, Brecht rejected Naturalism as a form because, through its recreation of a realistic space, it included a plethora rather than a selection of signs.
- 12.
Brecht, Quoted in Pia Kleber, Exceptions and Rules: Brecht, Planchon and “The Good Person of Szechwan” (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987), 53. After the sketches, the stage builder would create a model using the same materials as would make up the set and would attend and participate in rehearsals, all part of the collaboration between design and direction. Kleber, Exceptions, 53.
- 13.
Though Neher did not design Courage in 1949, his color sketches for a later production can be found in Susan DePonte, Caspar Neher—Bertolt Brecht: Eine Bühne für das epische Theater (Berlin: Henschel, 2006), 183–185.
- 14.
(Image 6.1) These are notes on The Tutor: “Results of the Rehearsals,” in Bertolt Brecht, Berliner Ensemble Adaptations, David Barnett, ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 409. For examples of a variety of sketches and color renderings by Neher and von Appen, see Susanne de Ponte, Caspar Neher—Bertolt Brecht: Eine Bühne für das epische Theater (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 2006) and Friedrich Dieckmann, Karl von Appens Bühnenbilder am Berliner Ensemble: Szenenbilder Figurinen, Entwürfe und Szenenphotos zu achtzehn Aufführungen (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1973).
- 15.
Brecht, Berliner Ensemble Adaptations, 409. Carl Weber tells us Brecht sat on the tenth row, behind a desk and surrounded by assistants and colleagues. See Jakovljević et al., “The Voice from the 10th Row,” 106. Brecht was about 15 feet from the stage.
- 16.
Angelika Hurwicz, “Brecht inszeniert Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis,” Riehe Theater heute 14 (Hannover: Friedrich Verlag, 1964), 3.
- 17.
- 18.
When the production team looked back on our process in hindsight, they highlighted one particular element: our use of Brecht’s form of blocking, Arrangement.
- 19.
Picturization and composition are not new tools in directing. Examples of exercises highlighting these concepts are found in directing texts such as Alexander Dean and Lawrence Carra’s classic book, Fundamentals of Play Directing revised edition (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965) 109–188. See further discussion about these scenes below.
- 20.
For a discussion on this point, see Barnett, Brecht in Practice, 90–93.
- 21.
David Barnett, A History of the Berliner Ensemble (Cambridge: The University Press, 2015), 56.
- 22.
- 23.
In this case, we used Microsoft PowerPoint™.
- 24.
BOP 198.
- 25.
BOP 198.
- 26.
Tom Kuhn, “Brecht Reads Bruegel: Verfremdung, Gestic Realism and the Second Phase of Brechtian Theory,” Monatsheft 105, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 101.
- 27.
Kuhn, “Brecht Reads Bruegel,” 101.
- 28.
BOT 159–61.
- 29.
Image 6.1.
- 30.
C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2005), 118.
- 31.
Kuhn, “Brecht Reads Bruegel,” 104.
- 32.
Kuhn, “Brecht Reads Bruegel,” 116.
- 33.
Kuhn, “Brecht Reads Bruegel,” 116.
- 34.
Kuhn, “Brecht Reads Bruegel,” 118.
- 35.
Some examples I used were Jacques-Louis David’s “The Intervention of the Sabines,” “The Death of Socrates,” and “Oath of the Horatii,” William Hogarth’s “Marriage A-la-Mode: 4, The Toilette,” Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “The Duel After the Masquerade,” Thomas Eakins’s “The Agnew Clinic,” and George Caleb Bingham’s “The Jolly Flatboatmen.”
- 36.
Perhaps for analogous reasons, Brecht often omitted initial read-throughs at the BE. For the 1949 production, Angelika Hurwicz recalled they did have a read-through, but the actors “were instructed to simply read the play, ‘that was it.’” See David Barnett, A History of the Berliner Ensemble, 31.
- 37.
See Chap. 5 for a full discussion of status/Haltung.
- 38.
For a combination of Brecht’s and Stanislavsky’s ideas of acting and, for examples of status versus intention, see Chap. 8.
- 39.
For further suggestions, see Dean and Carra, Fundamentals of Play Direction, 188.
- 40.
It goes without saying the players need a pack of cards.
- 41.
In the Berliner Ensemble, Eilif must have been seen as a more dangerous Figure: the soldiers guarded him with arquebuses. Though portable, these weapons are normally brought to a position and mounted, as they are in Scene 11, but here they are carried. Brecht: Complete Plays: Five, 310. In both Kushner’s and Brecht’s original text, they are pikes.
- 42.
Brecht considered this the most cruel action Courage took towards another Figure. “In no other scene is Courage so depraved as in this one.” Brecht, Collected Plays 5, 301.
- 43.
The Chaplain makes a subtle reference, “Good Catholics now, root and branches.” The Chaplain in 2015 accompanied these words by crossing himself. Kushner, Mother Courage, 43.
- 44.
“Brecht and I: Lotte Lenya Talks to Irving Wardle,” The Observer, September 9, 1962, quoted in Pamela Katz, The Partnership: Brecht, Weill, Three Women and Germany on the Brink (New York: Anchor Books, 2015), 100.
- 45.
In the Berliner Ensemble production, Kattrin was lying on a pallet, allowing the farmers to easily carry her off but also to remind the audience of the fate of Swiss Cheese.
- 46.
Shouting out a suggestion defeats the ability of the other participants to guess the new signs.
- 47.
For further discussion of this aspect of Brecht’s directing, see Chap. 7.
- 48.
He even asked his driver for feedback. See David Barnett, “Undogmatic Marxism: Brecht Rehearses at the Berliner Ensemble,” Edinburgh German Yearbook 75: Brecht and the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity, eds. Laura Bradley and Karen Leeder (New York: Camden House, 2011), 26, quoting Erinnerungen an Brecht, ed. Hubert Whitt (Leipzig: Reclam, 1964), 228–29.
- 49.
Carl Weber, “Brecht as Director,” Brecht, Erika Munk, ed. (New York: Bantam Books, Inc. 1972), 105.
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Gelber, B. (2023). Rehearsing the Actors I: Arrangement. In: Engaging with Brecht. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20394-7_6
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