Drama Theatre Performance Report

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This performance, showed me that despite their apparently unplanned nature, cut-up scripts require a lot of work to make something that is coherent and can be followed as a story. Furthermore, in our case, the script required an amount of co-operation from the audience, that at times I was unsure we would achieve. As such, this is one area where I feel our performance fell short. Had we better explained certain elements of our performance to the audience, and potentially given them more influence over the script, we could have produced something that was a more powerful example of what cut-up can achieve.

Also through this performance, I realised that epic theatre is an extremely broad style of theatre. I found the alienation effect an extremely interesting concept, as it contradicted much of what I had learned about drama theatre performance previously. I came to realise however that this style of theatre works well for works of a more intellectual level, yet works designed solely to entertain would not be suitable for this style of performance. Furthermore, despite the outwardly simplistic notion of the actor not embodying their role, this proved to be a challenging task. The more we rehearsed, the more we developed a sense of who our characters were, and this came out in a more emotive way than writers such as Brecht would have in their performances.

Word Count: 1072

Bibliography

Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot. ed. Zero Mostel and Alan Schneider, (Royal National Institute for the Blind,1952)

Brecht, Bertolt, A Short Organum for the theatre, (1949),

Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre, ed. By Paul Schlike (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015),

Davis, Nathaniel, ‘“Not a Soul in Sight!”: Beckett’s Fourth Wall’, Journal of Modern Literature, 38.2 (2015) 86-102. Google Scholar.

Gotman, Kelina, ‘Other Possible Worlds Onstage’, PAJ, 96 (2010) 48-54 (p. 49). Blackboard.

Kellner Douglas, ‘Brecht's Marxist Aesthetic’, in Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice, ed. By Betty Nance Webber and Hubert Heinen (Athens: University of Georgia Press,2010) pp.29-na.

Liu, Yao-Kun, ‘Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Peking Opera’, AUMLA, 116 2011,65-81. Literature Online.

Marlowe, Christopher, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus

Unwin, Stephen, The Complete Brecht Toolkit (London: Nick Hern Books Limited, 2014)

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