Not only was Brecht a prolific dramatist and poet, he also wrote extensively about the theatre and in particular about how he wanted his plays produced. Brecht’s theories about performance – first developed in the late 1930s – have enjoyed a life of their own ever since and served to confuse, delight and outrage students and theatre makers in equal measure. Although Howard Davies has an immense admiration for Brecht as a writer, he feels that '
Brecht’s theories of theatre don’t matter anymore '.
According to Davies, key Brechtian concepts such as the famous and '
much touted phrase '
the alienation effect , in which Brecht’s approach to performance keeps the audience at a distance, enabling them supposedly not just to look, but to look critically, is no longer relevant. Similarly
Brecht’s ideas on acting which, like most of the theory, was relevant in the context of the naturalistic and realistic theatre conventions of the first half of the twentieth century, was no longer useful to contemporary actors brought up in a very different theatrical climate.
Brecht wanted theatre that aroused a passion for argument, and in many ways this production of
The Life of Galileo succeeded in provoking that both amongst the cast and the audience. As Bertie Carvel (playing Ludovico) put it, '
the ideas come through in spite of you '. Brecht’s play required Carvel to, as he saw it, 'play a person first' and not to try to represent an idea. Simon Russell Beale, the actor playing Galileo, feels that Brecht was a ‘
better playwright than he was a theorist ’ and that ‘
he was a theatrical pragmatist above all ’.
