For about twenty years, into the mid-1970s, Brecht’s theatre achieved something like iconic status, partly due to the impact of two Berliner Ensemble productions at the International Theatre Festival in Paris: Mother Courage in 1954; in 1955, and markedly different, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. One more sombre and realist in performance, the other more parabolic and comic, both told emotionally compelling stories of “ordinary” lives endangered, or crushed, in large events. A dispassionate eye focused contemporary crises by means of historical and cultural distancing. The audiences admired the innovative dramaturgy’s moral focus and its aesthetic pleasure, normally thought to preclude each other.

Bertolt Brecht
German Federal Archive, 1954
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-W0409-300 /
Kolbe, Jörg / CC-BY-SA

IMAGE LICENSED UNDER Creative Commons
ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License

Though not really abstracting from the events of each plot, this dramaturgy was seen as intending dispassionate judgment rather than compassionate identification, in the hope that political insight would encourage desirable social consequences. Yet, as a prism separates the spectrum that constitutes a beam of seemingly pure white light, clarity, on reflection, is composed of impurities. Under scrutiny, perceptual gradations become apparent, initial black and white distinctions lose their contours, and what constitutes illumination changes.

Critics saw the performances in terms of Brecht’s distinction between “epic” demonstrative acting and “dramatic” empathetic psychologizing.^[1] Because it affected their aesthetic or philosophical interests, Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes each offered a more differentiated analysis of this new theatrical practice than advocacy, or dismissal, which characterized conventional criticism. Their responses were themselves productively conflicted.

Where others underlined the dramaturgy’s political message, Barthes singled out the aesthetic quality of performance, stressing what he called “l’acte théâtrale lui-même.” He described the overall effect: less semiology, or discursive coherence, than seismology, due to its power to disrupt.^[2] He connected Brecht’s social gestus — “one of the clearest and most intelligent [concepts] that dramatic theory has ever produced” — with what Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) called the “pregnant moment,” which draws together the strands of an episode into a memorable embodiment of significant meaning.^[3] In Brecht’s case, what mattered was less the particular topic than the attitude towards it revealed through the actor’s performance which is, to a degree, separated from a thereby distanced character and situation.

Barthes related this meaningful moment to Diderot’s tableau, constructed by an act of découpage, a cutting out (and, we may say, off), which simultaneously creates a (we may also say dubious) unity in what he calls a “geometric” discourse that offers, in a double sense, an arresting perspective on its subject. Such a tableau “has something to say (something moral, social) but it also says that it knows how this must be done.”^[4] When firmly cut out, we encounter “the coincidence of the visual and the ideal découpages,” and then an ideal meaning or whole is, in Diderot’s words, “contained under a single point of view.”^[5]

This can result in the creation of a “fetish-object,” though fetishization may come “to a halt,” depending on the tableau’s “composition.” Fetishization and composition together produce a “dialectic of desire.”^[5] Though this aesthetic both fetishizes an ideal meaning and awakens a desire to elude it, the critique, conducted within the performance, needs “a sovereignty of the actor, master of meaning, which is evident in Brecht, since he theorized it under the term ‘distanciation.’” As agent of the dramaturgy, distancing gives the actor sovereignty over the character. In spite of his admiration, this assumption pinpoints a dilemma for Barthes’s in Brecht’s “system,” since the movement of this dialectic of desire is predetermined by the strategy of its primary instrument, the alienation effect. We could say that the dramaturgic dice are loaded.^[6]

Perhaps this is why Barthes favoured fragmented or independent scenes in a loose structure, and disliked Mother Courage’s “maxims” like: “Whenever you find great virtues, you can be sure that something is going wrong.”^[7] Prompted by the actor’s distancing, the audience, in Barthes’s view, is expected to withhold support from such opinions. This dramaturgy therefore suggests, if with novel sophistication, a positive negation of the negation, rather than allowing an open-ended exploration of the dramatic material. The presumed découpage appears too confident, the “subject,” both topic and figure, too fetishized, too unified and objectified, too lacking the “textual” and musical, anti-determinist post structural qualities Barthes was beginning to favour, which undermine a more prescriptive structuralist representation.