Brecht Exploration - Our Country's Good - 13/6/18

Before we continued work on Our Country's Good, we looked into the Brechtian idea of gestus. Our teacher asked us how we would show -using props, set, costume, proxemics, characterisation and gesture- a political piece of theatre about the slave trade in the style of Brecht. The aim would be for the audience to understand the themes of the play and the key messages of the play by simply seeing a photograph of the action. Below is a quick brainstorm of our ideas:

We were then asked to look at the following images and decide whether they were taken from Brecht pieces of theatre or not, we quickly came to the conclusion that they were in fact all from Brecht's plays.

The use of song and stereotyped characters  are  key components of Brecht's work.

The visible, believe and subtle emotion in this picture made us question whether it was from  a Brechtian play but we were reminded that Brecht wasn't opposed to emotion but simply wanted the overall effect of his theatre to be political.

The set from the Threepenny Opera,  one of Brecht's  first big successes.

This is a famous picture of Mother Courage's silent scream from 'Mother Courage and Her Children' 

In groups, we then had to find a few scenes - from the beginning, middle and end of the play 'Our Country's Good' - that were not overtly political and had the potential to be very intimate and emotional. Taking one of these less political scenes we had the challenge of creating a set and staging the scene so that the audience would be much more focused on the political message of the scene rather than the sentimental value. This is our staging ideas for the rowing scene between Harry and Duckling, an officer and a convict who are in a relationship:

The most notable aspect of the set is the rowing boat which the characters are in, we decided to have this suspended from the ceiling so that when Harry gets angry during the scene, the boat would tip and we would visibly see Duckling's life in danger. This shows how the relationship is controlled by Harry and puts Duckling in a fragile position. We also decided to position the boat at the front of the stage with a gauze screen (lit from behind) in between the boat and the rest of the colony to show how they are trying to escape the confines of the regimented class system but they are still ever-present, the audience would still be able to see the suffering convicts under the large British flag.