Brecht and the Contradictory Actor

Abstract

Much scholarly material has been written on the subject of Brecht and the actor. The vast majority of this material, however, has focused on Brecht's various theoretical statements about acting, absolutizing them into an inviolate theory of socalled Epic performance and getting caught up in vaguely generalized comparisons between Brecht's system of acting and Stanislavski's.' I would not want to deny the partial validity of these discussions or impugn the assistance they have given several generations of theatre people in understanding and making use of Brecht's accomplishments. Such discussions tend, however, to undervalue the fact that Brecht was not primarily a theoretician who sometimes directed in order to exemplify his principles, but rather a director who continually modified or reconstituted his theories on the basis of what he learned from his practice; as Brecht told a group of students in 1954, one mustn't think of it as if there were someone with a specific conception of theatre that he wants to impose at all costs. 2 The Short Organon (1948), for example, is not Brecht's ultimate statement either about theatre in general or acting in particular. Rather, it is a position paper summarizing Brecht's thinking about his theatre work up to around 1947. During the remaining nine years of his life, Brecht constantly modified this thinking on the basis of his directorial and dramaturgical work at his Berliner Ensemble as the many and varied amendments, clarifications, and counterstatements to the Organon collected in Volume 16 of the Gesammelte Werke make perfectly clear.