ABSTRACT
Verfremdung has been described as ‘the key concept’ of B rech t’s theory of th e a tre .1 As such it is integral to the m ore general con cept of ‘ep ic’, and intim ately related to Gestus, since gestic acting in its natu re and effects was one of the principal vehicles of Verfrem dung. B rech t’s term itself has been variously translated as ‘alien a t io n ’, ‘e s tra n g e m e n t’, ‘é lo ig n em en t’, ‘d is ta n c ia tio n ’ and ‘defam iliarisation’. As he described it, it employed elements of stage design, m usic and lighting as well as a gestic acting style in a conscious — and in some ways self-conscious — attem pt to historicise characters and events. In this way the theatre-goer’s practically instinctual tendency to em pathise w ith supposedly ‘eternally h u m a n ’ characters and ‘un iversa l’ situations would be frustrated, and the ‘single cha in ’ of a ‘tim eless’ narrative necessary to a conventional illusion of reality would be in terrup ted . Instead of a unified and pacifying, or even sim ply ‘en terta in in g ’ work of art, with all its aesthetic and ideological concomitants, Brecht wished for an epic theatre in which acting, m usic and design, conceived as ‘a bundle of separate elem ents’, would operate autonom ously, bu t at the same tim e in a relation of com m entary and contrad ic tion with each other. T he im m ediate effect of this separation (principally of actor and audience from theatrical character and incident) w ould be one of surprise, dism ay and perhaps discom fort, as the aud ience’s unexam ined assum ptions about art and society took a jo lt. B rech t’s audience would then be ‘verfrem det’, and w ould react, so Brecht says, in the following way:
I should never have thought so — T h a t is not the way to do it. — This is m ost surprising, hardly credible. — This will have to stop. This hum an being’s suffering moves me, because
there would have been a way out for him . T his is great art: noth ing here seems inevitable — I am laughing about those who weep on the stage, w eeping about those who lau g h .2
