ABSTRACT
Given Brecht’s passionate commitment to changing the way theatre is made and received, his relative silence on the subject of practical exercises is indeed remarkable. While he was a prolific commentator on his aims, preferred models and collaborative stagings, he was far less voluble about aspects of preparatory training such as the nurturing of the performer’s expressive skills. Rather than developing a comprehensive system of tasks and activities, like Stanislavsky, or innovative psychophysical études, like Meyerhold, Brecht focused his energies on ways of interpreting and staging the events of the play and their social significance. This emphasis was born both of a tendency to work primarily from the position of a playwright-director and theorist, and of a political interest in telling interventionist stories. Brecht’s approach to training is captured in a 1943 journal entry where, in response to a criticism that his productions had hitherto neglected the actor’s technique, he remarks that his goal had been to ‘base the actor’s interestingness on the interest he brings to the social phenomenon with which he is concerned in his acting’ (Brecht 1993: 284). Cultivating the actor’s ability to generate such an interest was one of Brecht’s main contributions to Western theatre. To this end, he encouraged performers to adopt an activist way of looking at society and the stage, and to make this
new art of spectActing a pleasurable experience for their audience – so pleasurable that the spectators might even take it up themselves!
