Shakespeare Association of America, Annual Meeting
Cleveland, OH -- March 19-22, 1998

In my teaching, I  have discovered a wide chasm between the techniques of Stanislavsky and the theatricality of Shakespeare.  My advanced students rely primarily upon Stanislavsky but when they attempt to apply the psycho-technique to the intricate wordplay of a Shakespearean text, the results are often muddy, boring, and repetitive.  They seek to find, and thus sometimes create, subtext, psychological motivation, and detailed communication among people when it does not exist.  The students have been trained to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances; to maintain a high degree of public solitude; and to create an imaginary circle that does not extend beyond the apron of the stage.  They are baffled by long speeches that use imagery in lieu of subtext; by asides and soliloquies that call for addressing the audience directly; and by radical shifts of personality that contradict the fundamental tenets of the psycho-technique.

Most American theatre teachers and directors (myself included) resort to using the British vocal technique developed by Berry and now adapted by Linklater and Rodenburg to create a bridge for our Stanislavsky-trained actors. We still ask our students to use a psychological approach, but we emphasize the connection between body and voice and the importance of vocal control.  We speak of vocal variety; using the ladder; and addressing consciousness through the audience.  The results are decidedly mixed:  Most students--and consequently most American Shakespearean productions--come out of the process as neither fish nor fowl.  Actors have only a middling mastery of the vocal technique, and their desire to impose the psycho-technique--often to the detriment of the text--is not dissipated.

Classical works of theater--and particularly the plays of Shakespeare--do not lend themselves well to pictorial/naturalistic presentations.  How does one play "truthfully" the fifth act of The Winter’s Tale?  Paulina demands music--which magically pours forth--and then proclaims:

 ‘Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
 Strike all that look upon with marvel.  Come;
 I’ll fill your grave up: stir; nay, come away;
 Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
 Dear life redeems you. — You perceive she stirs:
  [HERMIONE comes down from pedestal]
 Start not; her actions shall be holy as
 You hear my spell is lawful: do not shun her
 Until you see her die again; for then
 You kill her double.  Nay, present your hand:
 When she was young you woo’d her; now in age
 Is she become the suitor.
 

It is my assertion that the real bridge between Stanislavsky and Shakespeare does not lie primarily in vocal technique.  Proper vocal technique is not a bridge to anywhere--rather it is a fundamental necessity that must proceed advanced acting training.  The real bridge--a solid structure--that will provide support for both actors and directors to tackle moments such as the fifth act of The Winter’s Tale is found in the theoretical and practical work of Bertolt Brecht.

In the 1930s, Brecht acknowledged the accomplishments of Stanislavsky.   He applauded the Russian director for introducing a rational methodology for training actors; for illustrating how psychological contradictions could be portrayed on the stage; for allowing the environment to influence characterization; and most important, for the naturalness of character portrayal (Brecht, 238).  But Brecht also believed that Stanislavsky’s technique had reached its creative limits (Brecht, 237).  Naturalistic acting, pictorial realism and illusionistic staging served only to reinforce the narcotic effect of conventional, bourgeois dramatic theater.  Brecht championed a new, socially committed theater as an alternative to psychological drama.  According to Meg Mumford, Brecht’s goal "was to transcend naturalism and achieve realism" (Mumford, 250).

The epic drama--as envisioned by Brecht--illustrates the alterability of society.  Using music, singing, technology and inventive staging techniques, Brecht and his associates created compelling  examples of socialist art.  Brecht claimed that "I wanted to take the principle that it was not just a matter of interpreting the world but of changing it, and apply that to the theater" (Brecht, 248).
 Brecht sought to reclaim the classic repertory from what he perceived to be its moribund state.  He asserted that the classics had suffered great harm from having naturalistic staging techniques foisted upon them. According to Brecht, "we grasp the old works by a comparatively new method--empathy--on which they rely little" (Brecht, 182-3).  The great classics are transformed into bourgeois melodramas driven by emotional identification in lieu of critical analysis or rational comprehension.  Brecht blasted the contemporary theatre:

Look at the conflict in Elizabethan dramatic art, complicated, variable, mainly objective, always unsolvable, and look at what is made of it today whether in modern drama or in modern reproductions of Elizabethan drama!  Look at the role of empathy then and now!  What an inconsistent, intermittent, complicated part it plays in Shakespearean theater!  What we are served today as "eternal laws of the drama" are the very modern laws laid down by L.B. Mayer and the Theatre Guild. (quoted in Rossi, 166)

Brecht produced and directed a variety of classic works over the course of his career, including Sophocles’ Antigone; Marlowe’s Edward II;  and Goethe’s Urfaust.  But clearly Brecht’s favorite was Shakespeare.  In the late 1920s, he adapted and directed Hamlet and Macbeth for radio and began an adaptation of Measure for Measure that eventually became Die Rundköpfe und Die Spitzköpfe.  Prior to his death, he began planning a production of Lear, and after he died, his version of Corialanus--that he worked on intermittently for twenty years--was finally produced.  In addition, he re-wrote scenes from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet as acting exercises for students and sketched an outline for a unfinished novel entitled The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.  In his critical essays on theater, Brecht refers repeatedly to Shakespeare.  In A Short Organum for the Theatre, he lays out an entire directorial concept for Hamlet (Brecht, 201-202), and in other writings he offers acting and staging suggestions for Richard II, King Lear, Julius Caesar and Macbeth.  John Rouse asserts that "Brecht’s relationship to Shakespeare may best be described as a life-long obsession" (Rouse, 267).

But Brecht had no desire to reproduce the classics as museum pieces.  He set forth the concept of aneignung (appropriation) whereby the classic works were to be reconfigured to convey social meaning to a contemporary audience.  Established texts are altered; scenes are cut, re-written or rearranged; additional, extra-textual material--in the form of slides, music, or speeches are added.  According to Brecht,  Shakespeare’s plays must address modern social and political concerns.  Shakespeare’s poetry is for the ages, but "the theater has to speak up decisively for the interests of its own time" (Brecht, 201).  The director, designers and actors need to find suitable alienating devices to provide a relevant reading for a modern audience.

In order to create a socially relevant reading of a classical work, the actors must engage the audience directly in a rational, critical dialogue. The epic theater of Brecht fuses the didactic and the entertaining by means of a fable that takes "what to the event or character is obvious, known, evident and produces surprise and curiosity out of it"(Brecht "On the Experimental Theatre," 14).  The process of alienation forces the audience to reassess what it has taken for granted.  Alienation is "the process of historifying, of presenting events and periods as historical, and therefore ephemeral" (ibid).  The conventions of sentimental melodrama and bourgeois tragedy are constructed, according to Brecht, upon the false belief that there is a universal sublime essence of human nature that can be extracted and represented.   Brecht rejects a static conception of the human personality dictated by psychological components.  He prefers a socially dynamic vision of man capable of altering his own circumstances:

If we ensure that our characters on the stage are moved by social impulses and that these differ according to the period, then we make it harder for our spectator to identify himself with them.  He cannot simply feel: That's how I would act, but at most can say: If I had lived under those circumstances.  And if we play works dealing with our own time as though they were historical, then perhaps the circumstances under which he himself acts will strike him equally odd; and this is where the critical attitude begins. ... The 'historical conditions' must of course not be imagined (nor will they be so constructed) as mysterious Powers (in the background); on the contrary, they are created and maintained by men. (Brecht, 160).

Classical dramas with contemporary resonance make effective parable fables.  To avoid emotional empathy and to encourage a critical attitude among the spectators, a new style of acting must be implemented.  The epic acting style appropriates and adapts some techniques of Stanislavsky while striking out into new territory.

The epic style of acting calls for a highly skilled, cool, detached performer who reports directly to the audience (not unlike Chorus in Henry V).  The epic actor imitates precisely the physical and vocal qualities of his or her character in a series of "gestic" references that reveal social and economic status.   In epic theater, character is a composite of contradictions caused by the dialectic between the inherent goodness of human nature and the societal imperatives that undermine it.  The epic actor illustrates the contradictions of his or her character--through action, gesture, or gestic speech.  Emotions are always externalized and developed into gestures (e.g. Chinese acting techniques).  So if an actor wishes to illustrate fear, she can dip her hands into white powder and then smear her face.  Such a gesture would alienate the emotion and force the audience to consider it critically.   To alienate an action is to offset it--to rise it above the level of the everyday, the obvious, and the expected.  Brecht uses a key moment from Lear to illustrate the notion of gestic action:

If Lear tears up a map when he divides his kingdom between his daughters, then the act of division is alienated.  Not only does it draw our attention to his kingdom, but by treating the kingdom so plainly as his own property he throws some light on the feudal idea of family. (Brecht, 143)
 

The epic actor is perfectly at home in the non-illusionistic, thoroughly theatrical world of Shakespeare’s play--A place where actor and audience are intended to interact.   The epic actor engages the audience on a personal basis.  The epic actor works assiduously to enlist, convince, and activate both the supportive and hostile factions of a divided audience.  At times, the epic actor may even seek to set off one part of the audience against another.  According to Peter Brook, "For Brecht, a necessary theatre could never for one moment take its sights off the audience it was serving.  There was no fourth wall between actor and audience--the actor’s unique aim was to create a precise response in an audience for whom he had total respect" (Brook, 72).  The epic actor is quite at home with either the soliloquy or the aside.  Since the epic actor rejects the Stanislavsky notion of the imaginary circle and public solitude, he or she has no difficulty in transcending the chasm between the stage and audience.

The epic actor has no tendency to mumble lines, exclaim wildly, or get lost in a generalized emotional wash because of imperatives dictated by the desire to "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances."  The Epic actor never "lives truthfully" but rather is concerned with demonstrating fully. Epic acting techniques and staging devices are intended to make the plays of Shakespeare visceral and compelling for a specific audience at a given time and place.  Epic productions are not intended to speak to the ages, but rather to the here and now.

The influence of Brecht upon American and British Shakespearean production is quite significant.  The Berliner Ensemble’s visit to London in 1956-57 revolutionized Shakespearean production in Britain.   Dennis Kennedy asserts that John Barton, John Bury, Peter Brook, William Gaskill, Peter Hall and Joan Littlewood were heavily influenced by Brecht’s acting and staging techniques.  Kennedy claims that Peter Hall was so taken with the quality of Brecht’s company that he organized the Royal Shakespeare Company along the same lines as the Berliner Ensemble (Kennedy, 179).  He concludes that the tour led "a number of important directors and designers in western Europe [to] recognize that the Ensemble’s methods had broad applications for the classics" (Kennedy, 203).

Numerous Brechtian staging devices began appearing regularly in British Shakespearean productions:  placards and projections; masks for characterization; the half-curtain and the revelation of stage mechanisms; and the developed relationship between actors and their props.  According to John Rouse,  the Royal Shakespeare Company spread watered-down Brechtian staging and performance ideas across Europe and eventually to North America.  Rouse points specifically to the influence of the company on Peter Zadek who was raised in London and began his theatrical career in Britain before becoming the foremost director in the German theater (Rouse, 276).   In addition to Zadek and Gaskill, a number of other European directors in the 1960s became identified as "Brechtians"--the most famous of whom were Roger Planchon and Giorgio Strehler.  In America, Michael Kahn--a self-acknowledged Brechtian at that time--took over the American Shakespeare Festival in 1967.

The most significant disciple of Brecht has undoubtedly been Peter Brook.  Brook’s  non-illusionistic, wildly theatrical, watershed productions of The Tempest (1968) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) owe a debt to numerous avant-garde artists including Artaud, Grotowski, and particularly Brecht.  In The Empty Space, Brook discusses at length the importance of "the Rough Theatre" and the theatrical effectiveness of alienation.  He concludes that "Shakespeare is a model of a theatre that contains Brecht and Beckett, but goes beyond both" (Brook, 85-86).  Brook’s Brechtian musings and experiments apparently had a great impact on Charles Marowitz who was his assistant during the 1960s.  In the 1970s and 1980s, Marowitz embraced Brecht’s notion of aneignung and created a series of startling and shocking montage adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays.

In the closing chapters of "Looking at Shakespeare," Dennis Kennedy argues that the postmodern work of contemporary innovators such as Akalitis, Bogart, Bogdonov, Ciulei, Foreman, Warner, and Wilson find their roots in the Brechtian rebellion that spread across Europe in the 1950s:

"The postmodern suspension of the past inside the present can actually be traced to Brecht, particularly to his realization that the rapidity of change and the increase of knowledge in the modern world have forced us to see history in a new light: not as a finalized past but as a process in which the new continuously transfigures the old." (Kennedy, 302-303).

Brecht’s influence upon Shakespearean performance in England and America has hovered in the background for political, philosophical, and aesthetic reasons.  Brecht’s embracing of Marxist ideology and his close association with the East German State made him something of an anathema in America until well into the 1960s--long after he had died.  In England, the more radical nature of politics made Brecht more acceptable--thus artists such as Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker freely admit their debt to him.  Nevertheless, Brecht’s reputation and influence has been eclipsed by Stanislavsky.  The major reason is that Stanislavsky’s psycho-technique was created for illusionistic, naturalistic drama-- the kind of representation that is still popular.   Brecht’s acting techniques do not elicit the emotional identification and empathy that American audiences--weaned on television and the movies- desperately crave.  And Brecht’s notion of appropriation offends the Shakespeare establishment which denigrates any work that compromises the textual integrity of the Bard (Marowitz, 1-15).

It is my assertion that Brecht’s techniques need to be reclaimed and re-examined.  They must be freed from Brecht’s political agenda and appreciated as theatrical innovations that are effective in their own right.  The epic theatre and the epic acting style offer a number of interesting approaches to wonderful theatrical moments such as the fifth act of The Winter’s Tale.  If we approach Paulina’s speech and Hermione’s revival as magical moments that require theatrical flourish, then we can begin to use our own creativity to complete a scene that seems strained and ridiculous on the page but which should be made wondrous on the stage.
 
In closing, I throw out a few questions:  Must the end of The Winter’s Tale be believable or should it be wonderful?  And, is it possible for the end to be both?  What is to be gained in playing it as a semi-private moment filled with pathos compared to a large public spectacle?  How do staging choices effect acting styles?  Finally, how do staging and acting choice reconfigure meaning?

WORKS CITED

Berry, Cicely.  The Actor and the Text.  London:  Harrap Ltd, 1987.
Brecht, Bertolt.  Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willet.  New York: Hill & Wang, 1964.
 Brecht, Bertolt.  Onthe Experimental Theatre." Translated by Carl Richard Mueller.  The Tulane Drama Review 6, no. 1
    (1961): 3-17.
Brook, Peter.  The Empty Space.  New York: Atheneum, 1968.
Kennedy, Dennis.  Looking At Shakespeare.  Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press, 1993
Linklater, Kristin.  Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice.  New York: Theatre  Communications Group, 1992.
Marowitz, Charles.  Recycling Shakespeare.  New York: Applause, 1991.
Mumford, Meg.  Brecht Studies Stanislavski: Just A Tactical Move?  New Theatre Quarterly  XI, no. 43
    (August 1995):  241-258.
Rodenburg, Patsy.  The Right To Speak.  New York: Routledge, 1992.
Rokem, Freddie.  Acting and Psychoanalysis: Street Scenes, Private Scenes, and Transference. Theatre Journal
    39, no. 2 (May 1987): 175-184.
Rossi, Doc. Brecht on Shakespeare: A Revaluation. Comparative Drama  30, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 158-185.
Rouse, John. Shakespeare and Brecht: The Perils and Pleasures of  Inheritance. Comparative Drama  17, no. 3
    (Fall 1983):  266-280.
 Stanislavsky, Constantin.  An Actor Prepares.  Translated by Elizabeth  Reynolds Hapgood.  New York:  Theatre Art Books, 1948.