Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 23

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
For Berthold Brecht, theatre was a transformative act, most effective for those who made
it, imagining things to become “other”. That power he saw almost as shamanic, magic—
the power being its roots in ritual. In Brecht’s eyes, epic theatre should not cause the
spectator actually to identify with the characters or action before them, rather it should
provoke a rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on stage. Brecht, in
effect, wanted his audience to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognise social
injustice and exploitation, and to be moved to leave the theatre to effect change outside;
these techniques reminding the spectator that the play is a representation of reality, not
reality itself.
Figure 13: Brecht, Artaud and Wagner
To a large degree, this was the antithesis of the “overwhelming of the senses” advocated
by Richard Wagner in his operas, and by the influential dramatist, poet, actor and all
round man of the theatre Antonin Artaud.
In 1938, Artaud wrote “Theatre and its Double”, a manifesto of his so-called “theatre of
cruelty”. He sought to create a theatre that was, in effect, a return to magic and ritual, in-
venting a new theatrical language of totem and gesture, devoid of dialogue, which would
appeal to the senses. “Words say little to the mind, compared to space thundering with
images and crammed with sounds.” Formal theatre with scripts was “a hindrance to the
magic of genuine ritual.”
Not a million miles away from Wagner almost a century earlier, when in 1849 he coined
the term Gesamtkunstwerk—all inclusive art work, embracing and synthesising all the
art forms—musical, visual and literary in the interests of an all-powerful sensory experi-
ence to overwhelm the spectator.
Wagner was an admirer of the earliest of the Greek dramatists Aeschylus, citing him as
the finest exponent of total artistic synthesis, later “corrupted” by Euripides, as the art
forms went their separate ways. David Greig’s 2017 production of Aeschylus’s Suppliant
Women, referred to above, was Gesamkunstwerk in the Wagnerian sense.
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