The Age of Distantiation

Bertolt Brecht was a theatre practitioner in the first half of the 20th Century. He recognised the power of cinema and its disruptive effect on theatre. Film was better able to realistically capture the intimacy of human interaction and created a ‘nearness of experience’ that the theatre wasn’t able to replicate. This didn’t however, at least to Brecht, mean theatre was redundant. Instead, he developed what he called ‘Epic Theatre’, which argued that theatre should be a space for political discussion and critical aesthetics. In practice this meant a play should be performed in a way that does not cause the audience to identify emotionally with the characters but instead, by distancing the spectator, prompting rational self-reflection and a more critical view of the action on stage. How this manifested in production was by having sets be minimal and obvious, not utilising stage crew to change scenery or props but instead have the actors do it, having any musical instrument that is heard performed on stage with the actors, actors would speak stage directions aloud and speak directly to the audience and any other tool that would let people know they are watching a play. He called this approach Verfremdungseffekt, which roughly translates as ‘The Distancing Effect’. This was all part of the modernist movement and had similar practices elsewhere like how Joyce deconstructed the approach to the novel by undermining a singular…