Brecht in Practice: Staging Drama Dialectically

贝托尔特·布莱希特（Bertolt Brecht, 1998-1956）是20世纪戏剧界最有影响力和雄心勃勃的人物之一。虽然他的戏剧作品经常在英国剧院上演，为公众所熟知，但他也是一位伟大的戏剧理论家和实践者，该项目旨在传播这两个角色之间的对话。布莱希特创造了一系列在纸面上看起来难以捉摸、无法实现或晦涩难懂的术语，这对他自己没有什么好处。例如，Verfremdung被不同地翻译为“异化”、“隔阂”和“距离”，但在实践中，通过阐明矛盾的行为或态度，可以更好地理解表演中“使熟悉的事物变得陌生”的过程。其他术语，如Fabel，给导演和演员都带来了问题，他们可能很难理解强调戏剧情节的解释如何能帮助他们更好地理解自己的角色。因此，这个项目旨在解决理论与实践之间明显的鸿沟，并源于我对布莱希特在他共同创立的剧院公司柏林合奏团的实践进行的初步研究。该项目以“布莱希特方法”的戏剧表演为出发点。该方法检查个人的意见，行动和行为之间的关系的戏剧性材料，以及他们的社会告知他们的复杂方式。布莱希特导演试图在排练之前确定这些关系，然后在他们与演员的合作中使用这些解释。反过来，演员们也被鼓励不要在排练一个场景的前一天晚上准备他们的表演，而是要理解这个场景的社会前提，并在当时对其他演员的表演做出反应。其目的是产生基于社会情境的生动作品，而不是人物的感知心理。因此，更固定的“性格”让位于更流动的“身材”。新的表演模式也出现了，这些模式试图将人物与其社会背景联系起来。“方法”的概念表明，布莱希特不仅在为自己的戏剧起草新方法，而且还在为其他剧作家写的剧本起草新方法。因此，这个项目选择了一个与布莱希特传统无关的作者的戏剧，以便向戏剧制作者和观众展示布莱希特的戏剧创作理念和模式超出了他自己的戏剧构思方式。这个项目选择的剧本是帕特里克·马伯（Patrick Marber）的《走近》（Closer）（1997），从表面上看，它关注的是四个角色复杂的爱情生活。这是对欲望变幻无常的本质的探索，四对夫妇在追求剧名所暗示的亲密关系的十二场戏中，分开又重新结合。然而，布莱希特邀请戏剧制作人考虑场景的社会背景，并询问为什么人物愿意如此频繁地“反复无常”，为什么亲密的目标如此难以实现。因此，布莱希特式的作品可能会选择考察一个人际关系日益商品化的社会，并将其发现与人物相互交往的方式联系起来。同样，后撒切尔时代的90年代，社会的衰落和个人的提升也融入了该剧的情感景观。因此，布莱希特式的作品旨在相对化个人决策的自主权，并将其置于特定社会的社会规范背景之下。个人行为与社会价值观的联系表明，如果人们改变社会结构，这种行为就可以改变，这就是布莱希特戏剧背后的政治希望。

Bertolt Brecht (1998-1956) is one of the most influential and ambitious figures in twentieth-century theatre. While he is known to a broad public for his plays, which are often performed in UK theatres, he was also a great theorizer and practitioner of theatre, and it is the dialogue between these two roles that the project aims to disseminate beyond the academy. Brecht did himself few favours by coining a series of terms that, on paper, can appear slippery, unachievable or obscure. Verfremdung, for example, has been variously translated as 'alienation', 'estrangement' and 'distanciation', but this process of 'making the familiar strange' in performance can be understood better in practice by articulating contradictory behaviours or attitudes. Other terms, such as Fabel, pose problems for both directors and actors who may struggle to understand how an emphasis on an interpreted version of a play's plot will help them better understand their roles. This project, then, is designed to address the apparent gulf between theory and practice, and is derived from primary research I have carried out into Brecht's practices at the theatre company he co-founded, the Berliner Ensemble. The project takes as its starting point the 'Brechtian method' of staging drama. The method examines dramatic material for the relationships between the opinions, actions and behaviours of individuals, and the complex ways in which their society informs them. Brechtian directors seek to identify these relationships prior to rehearsal and then use these interpretations in their work with actors. Actors are, in turn, encouraged not to prepare their performances the night before rehearsing a scene, but to understand the scene's social premises and respond in the moment to the performances of other cast members. The aim is to generate lively work predicated on the social situation, rather than the perceived psychology of the characters. As a result, the more fixed 'character' gives way to the more fluid 'figure'. New modes of performance also emerge, ones that seek to connect the figure to its social context. The concept of a 'method' suggests that Brecht was not only drafting new means for staging his own plays, but also those written by other dramatists. This project thus takes a play by an author not associated with the Brechtian tradition in order to demonstrate to theatre-makers and spectators that Brecht's ideas for and modes of making theatre extend beyond his own ways of conceiving drama. The play chosen for this project, Closer by Patrick Marber (1997), is, to all appearances, concerned with the complicated love-lives of its four characters. It is an exploration of the fickle nature of desire as the four couple, de-couple and re-couple over the course of twelve scenes in the pursuit of the intimacy suggested by the play's title. Brecht, however, invites theatre-makers to consider the social context of the scenes and asks why the characters are willing to 'chop and change' so frequently and why the goal of intimacy is so hard to attain. A Brechtian production may thus choose to examine a society in which human relationships have become increasingly commodified and relate its findings to the manners in which the figures engage with each other. Similarly, the erosion of community and the promotion of the individual in the post-Thatcherite 1990s also feeds into the emotional landscape of the play. A Brechtian production thus aims to relativize the autonomy of individual decision-making and frame it against the background of the given society's social codes. The link of personal behaviour to social values proposes that such behaviour can be changed if people change social structures, and this is the political hope that underlies Brechtian theatre.