Verfremdung “Verfremdung”, pronounced “fair-frem-doong”, is a German word used by Bertolt Brecht that lies at the very heart of his theories on epic theatre. In practice he called it “verfremdungseffekt”. The term has variously been translated as “alienation effect”, “distancing effect” and “estrangement effect”. For decades, “alienation effect” was the accepted term for Brecht’s acting…
Epic theatre was first practiced by Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) in Berlin in the 1920s. Although Brecht would soon claim the notion of an “epic theatre” as his own idea, there is evidence the term was previously being used in debates in avant-garde circles before this. Epic references the great epic poems…
The first in a series of articles on epic theatre explores the man synonymous with the form, Bertolt Brecht. Bertolt Brecht was born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht on 10 February 1898 in Augsburg, Germany, to middle class parents. As a young man he studied medicine and served in an army hospital as an orderly, successfully…
Anne Pender, University of New England Let’s face it, Thursday evenings on ABC television are not quite the same any more. The mesmerising, idiosyncratic sketches of Clarke and Dawe are now consigned to Australian television history. Still, Sammy J has taken the spot, and the good news is that the spirit of Clarke lives…
Julian Meyrick, Flinders University In our Great Australian Plays series, we nominate the best of Australian drama. If Australian drama came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, in the 1970s it reached full maturity. More work by more playwrights by more companies for larger audiences: this is the basic narrative of the period. The…
Did you know there are 41 Broadway theatres of 500+ seats? If you’d like to know the names, seating capacities, longest running shows, owners and opening year of all 41 Broadway theatres, then read on! Beauty and the Beast became the longest running show at both the Palace Theatre and the Lunt-Fontane Theatre (exact split…