Bertolt Brecht - playwrite or theorist

The statements made about Bertolt Brecht as a playwright and Bertolt Brecht as a theorist are both true and false depending on which angle you choose to look at them. His different theories on alienating his audience, ways of staging his plays and using his own techniques of ‘Epic Theatre’ are often not consistent with the plays that he writes. However, he does use some aspects of them religiously. These aspects could be anything from a style of speech to his minimal use of set and props. ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ (1939) and ‘Life of Galileo’ (1938) are two of his famous scripts that are a perfect example of his plays rejecting his theories.

‘Epic Theatre’ was Brecht’s solution to realism. He believed that “realist dramatic forms are based on artificial and unnecessary restrictions.” He fought to break away from these systems by using a looser narrative and not be tied down to realism’s concept of limited space and time. This meant that he would...