U2's Innocence and Experience as Brechtian Theater

Abstract

U2's Innocence and Experience as Brechtian Theater Clare Chiappetta Artists have often used performance to to advocate social change. Many are planned to make audiences feel something; the local news, for example, often concludes with a "feel good" story. But performance can also be designed to unsettle and to shake the spectators, causing them not only to question but also to change the status quo. Among the most influential advocates of using performed narratives as a tool of change was the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), whose groundbreaking ideas on epic theater and the theater of alienation revolutionized the communication of social and political ideas on the stage. Walter Benjamin said that performance "does not reproduce situations, rather it discovers them."1 Brecht channels this discovery first into education, and finally into action. This process is precisely what U2 staged in the first leg of their Innocence + Experience tour (I+E). Through their lyrics, and by dramatizing—and then disrupting—their own individual stories as members of the band and citizens of Ireland during the Troubles, U2 articulates social values that they invite the audience to share. For decades, U2 has sought to use its music and fame to influence politicians and effect change on local and global levels. During their I+E tour, U2 took a politically charged stance on immigration reform in an effort to create a global community seeking to protect and empower the vulnerable. In performance, U2's members compare their own individual stories of growing up during the time of the Troubles to the refugee crisis in the Middle East. The jarring history of the Irish conflict is introduced, and then interrupted, by stories from the refugee crisis in contemporary Syria. All four band members spent their adolescent years in 1970s Dublin, and although their relatively privileged suburban neighborhood did not afford a direct experience of the violence in Northern Ireland, Dubliners—even suburban Dubliners in Malahide—were well aware of the riots, warfare, and bombs that [End Page 67] had become commonplace in the North; images of the violence were broadcast into their homes every day, and virtually everyone had friends or family in the province. It was during these tense circumstances, the worst years of the Troubles, that the members of U2 set out to create their own narrative. Nearly forty years after the band's founding, the 2015–2016 portion of the Innocence and Experience tour can be viewed as a form of theater of alienation, or what Brecht called verfrumdung, a moment when spectators are simultaneously engaged in the performance as well as estranged from it. The object of classic Greek theater was for its audience to achieve a moment of catharsis; the alienation effect (or "a-effect") seeks to achieve the opposite. The audience's enjoyment is broken, or disrupted, by an action or stage device that interrupts the context of the performance. The audience must be first enmeshed in the performance, and then shocked out of it; the interruption requires the viewer to recontextualize the action to discover its new meaning. One critic describes the a-effect as "a double perspective on events and actions so as at once to show their present contradictory nature and their historical cause or social motivation." 2 The conventions of "story" melt away to reveal the social implications of its creation. U2's performance during the tour focuses a great deal on creating a sense of story. They not only perform their own history of the Troubles, but they also educate by inviting their audience to share in and reach a more personal understanding. This internal perspective draws the audience into the performance, which will be disrupted by sound effects, changes in lyrics, and dramatic actions. Manfred Wekwerth, a critic of Brechtian theater, describes Brecht's goal in the theater of alienation as nothing less than "changing the world."3 Wekwerth points out that theater and other performative acts have the power to introduce the desire to make a difference in the world. Brechtian thought inherently assumes communal action: "A theater that seeks to change the world must above all . . . awaken people's courage and capacity for collectivism."4 The I...