Epic Theatre

Epic Theatre

The film Dr. Strangelove has many scenes and ideas that draw a parallel with the techniques that were used by Bertolt Brecht in his writings of epic theatre. The style in which Brecht had developed himself, through his own thought of what theatre should be, had a main goal to make the audience reach their own conclusions and not to become involved emotionally. One of his most distinguished techniques was that of Verfremdungseffekt or the alienation or estrangement effect, this effect was achieved by choosing unfamiliar settings, interrupting the action with songs, and announcing the contents of each scene through posters.

The distractions during Dr. Strangelove or rather idiosyncrasies during the film are the building blocks of Brecht’s formula for epic theatre. Some examples from the film are the long scenes when the plane is flying with the music in the background and also at the end when all of the nuclear bombs are exploding all over the world. With out these interruptions during the film, Brecht’s idea of reminding the audience that they are in a theatre and not reality would totally annihilate the concept of epic theatre.

This perception of not being in reality did not let the audience become emotionally involved with the characters of the film, essentially making the audience think for themselves and in essence satisfying Brecht’s passion for how the play should be viewed. Another modus operandi that Brecht introduced is that actors made the audience “jump” called quotable gesture or the employment of a stance, mannerism, or repeated action to sum up a character. The sudden shift from one behavior to another puts the audience off-balance. Since the characters are so unpredictable in their actions, this makes the audience think, for all intents and purposes teaching us to criticize the society the audience sees onstage.

Brecht also wrote his plays in a time of warfare and a lot of them dealt with how he viewed politics in that epoch, his most eminent were about the Nazis. When the film came out in 1964, the Cold War was subject in which everybody in America had an issue with, mostly because of the fear of being attacked. Dr. Strangelove