Epic Theatre

Epic theatre is the form of theatre in which Brecht created along with other practitioners in his career. However, later on in his career he preferred the term 'dialectical theatre'. This is because he felt epic theatre was too formal and did not describe the form in the best way.

Epic theatre requires the actors to use 'Gestus' in performances. This is the combination of gesture and attitude to express what the character thinks and feels about certain things.  The main aim of Epic theatre was to make the audience aware at all times that they were watching a play. This was different to naturalism where Stanislavsky tried to mimic the everyday in order to immerse the audience, epic theatre was not meant to create escapism for the audience. It was meant to make them question and think about why and how things were happening onstage.

In an epic theatre play there would not be loads of big staging and back drops to try and make it realistic. Often if an actor needed to change costume, they would do so onstage in front of the audience onstage. If props were needed to be moved either the actors could do it or stage management could, but often, like in the national theatres production of 'Mother Courage and her children' by Bertolt Brecht, they would not wear black like in traditional theatre but they wore their own clothes. This meant they would stand out more.

Alienation Effect (Vermfremdungseffekt) translation
This was the technique Brecht wanted to use in epic theatre. It was the way he thought the audience would be able to question what was going on onstage. It was where the audience felt detached from the characters onstage. You can achieve this by creating something strange and out of the everyday. This will mean that the audience find it strange and immediately notice it and begin to question why, because of how peculiar it is. This is like when we did the moody objects exercise.