Drama Theatre Performance Report

Drama Theatre Performance Report

For this assessment, my group chose to do a performance. We drew influence from elements of both the Dadaist cut-up writing technique, and Epic Theatre.  This was because we felt that these were two methods of performance that combined well, being as they both reject the realism required by the naturalist discipline. Our script was formed from a range of plays, and divided into three sections each comprised entirely out of works from either the Elizabethan, Victorian or Contemporary eras, as we hoped to show the development and change of dramatic language through time. Due to having Julia Barclay as an influence for our performance, we allowed the audience to select the costumes, props and even genders of certain characters.

Much of our epic theatre influence, was concerned with the techniques that led to the verfremdungseffekt, otherwise known as alienation of the audience. Keller states that ‘By preventing empathetic illusion or a mimesis of reality, epic theatre would expose the workings of societal processes’^[1]. The audience are reminded that they are watching a performance, not actual life events, altering ‘the spectator's position from passive reception to active participation in the critical judgement and examination’^[2] of a performance.

One of the first techniques our performance included, was scene descriptions that outlined the events due to occur in that five-minute section. This drew inspiration from the half-curtain that Brecht used during scene changes, where ‘text was sometimes projected onto it, or an actor would step forward and a song would be sung’^[3]. We adapted this for our own use, and instead of having a curtain, we used a whiteboard, that we projected a scene description onto.  Brecht claimed that the actor, ‘need not pretend that the events taking place on the stage have never been rehearsed, and are now happening for the first and only time’^[4]. I feel our scene descriptions achieved this, as the actor and audience knew exactly what was going to happen. This broke the illusion of real life that naturalist theatre places upon an audience, and allowed them to be critical of what was occurring.  Unwin comments that the half-curtain ‘wiped the slate clean for a new image’, and we took this idea, and developed it with other techniques of changing costume in front of the audience and of changing roles ^[5]. This made it clear to the audience that the last scene was being left behind, and also set off the new scene with the illusions of naturalistic theatre freshly broken.  

A further method of alienation used in Epic theatre, is the breaking of the fourth wall. We included this early on in our performance, incorporating the line ‘ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show’^[6]. The direct address, confronts the audience with the reality that this is a performance, and ‘creates an effect of alienation that allows the spectator to awaken from his passive state’^[7]. Thus the audience is able to deal with the performance in a critical capacity, taking in its message from the beginning.  Furthermore, we broke character between each scene as we handed out scripts to the audience and changed the backdrop. As such, the audience is constantly reminded that there is a distinction between the actor and the character, and that the latter does not inhabit the former as one would in a Stanislavskian method performance. In the context of our performance, this helped encourage people to partake in the issuing of stage directions and costuming for each scene, as they were no longer in a ‘passive state’.  

Our staging was minimalistic, so as to be in keeping with epic theatre writers, as ‘Brecht’s designers sometimes … presented the stage simply as a stage’^[8], and in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the setting is simply described as ‘A country road. A tree. Evening’^[9]. Brecht used this minimalism, in a rejection of the naturalist view that the stage is a ‘real room whose fourth wall is removed when the curtain rises’^[10]. For our performance, this translated to backdrops of images synonymous with each era as signifiers for what era the scene being presented was in. We had a table to suggest an interview room, however there was never enough evidence on stage for a definite location to be settled on by the audience. Thus, the audience were never able to fully imprint their own emotions and experience onto the scene and occurrences, ensuring they couldn’t connect to the actors as an audience.

During writing our script, one thing in particular that we incorporated, was audience involvement, a technique Barclay uses in Besides, You Lose Your Soul or The History of Western Civilization. As such audiences could choose some stage directions and costumes for our characters, as ‘it desacralized … the illusion of spontaneous delivery’^[11]. Audience involvement meant that they were forced to engage in the performance, and think about what they were seeing and what they wanted to see. This could be considered a more extreme realisation of Brecht’s desire for the audience to participate in the performance.