Brecht Exploration - Our Country’s Good - 6/6/18

After learning the basics of Brecht's genre of Epic Theatre, we looked at an extract of his play Mother Courage and Her Children. We were asked to identify aspects of Brecht's style within the extract that we could see just by skimming through the scene, we found:

• Placards - the contents of them shown at the beginning of the scene, outlining what happens in the scene, used to distance the audience, make them aware of the theatrical nature of the play and to remove suspense
• Song - used in the middle of the scene to comment on the themes in the play
• Generic names - all characters (except from Mother Courage and her children Kattrin, Eilif and Swiss Cheese) have names that simply define their roles in the play and the wider society e.g. Cook, Sergeant, Peasant 
• Gestus - Mother Courage always wears a money pouch that makes a noise when she walks, constantly reminding the audience of her character and what her character represents
• Large narrative - we noticed in the stage directions at the beginning of the scene it stated this scene was '3 years later' than the previous one, an example of how Brecht used large narratives to distance the audience so that they didn't have time to develop sentimental feelings for the characters.

We then looked at the play Our Country's Good, which was not written by Brecht but by Timberlake Wertenbaker. The play is set in a penal colony in the 1780's and follows the action of the convicts in the colony putting on a play of 'The Recruiting Officer'. The play explores themes of sexuality, class, punishment, the judicial system and the idea of theatre as a positive form of rehabilitation.

After discussing the ways in which Brecht's ideas fit in with this play (in particular the strong political messages and how it is set in the past), we looked at Act 1, Scene 6 in which the Authorities debate the merits of putting on the play, over alcohol and food. We divided up the parts, read through the first few pages and started to think about staging the piece. It became very quickly obvious that there were certain characters who were over-the-top, comedic stereotypes and violently opposed to the idea of a play being acted by the convicts, or simply anything that treated the 'contumelious convicts' in a vaguely human manner (e.g. Major Robbie Ross). Within the authorities, there are also voices of reason, much more human characters who are not stereotyped and show genuine empathy and emotion towards the convicts (e.g. Captain Arthur Phillip). 

To stage this scene in a Brechtian we focused on the irony of how the upper, ruling class were drunkenly bantering about the livelihood of the lower class whilst being blind to their own privilege and prejudice of women, convicts, the lower classes and other races. Below is the link for the beginning of the scene we started to work on:

You can see that we chose to have a large banquet table at the centre of the stage to show the importance of the men's life of luxury, with an abundance of food and drink. We also gave chains to the characters who were the most bitter, drunk and ignorant to show their power over the lives of the convicts and their inability to see them as humans. This also provides a similar effect to Mother Courage's money bag that creates a sound wherever she moves, as the chains make a harsh sound when the actor moves, drawing attention to the symbol.