History Creator / BertoltBrecht

* AnAesop: His plays drew their form on parables and fables. Certain plays, the "Lehrstücke"(Teaching Plays) were intended to serve as entirely didactic. Brecht being Brecht, the Aesop and the conclusions drawn at the end veer towards SpoofAesop, [[invoked]]AlternateAesopInterpretation, SpaceWhaleAesop and above all HardTruthAesop.

* ''Galileo'' (1975 film by Creator/JosephLosey, starring Creator/{{Topol}] as Galileo).

* ''Galileo'' (1975 film by Joseph Losey, starring Topol as Galileo).

* AnAesop: His plays drew their form on parables and fables. Certain plays, the "Lehrstücke"(Teaching Plays) were intended to serve as entirely didactic. Brecht being Brecht, the Aesop and the conclusions drawn at the end veer towards SpoofAesop, AlternateAesopInterpretation, SpaceWhaleAesop and above all HardTruthAesop.

* ForegoneConclusion: Brecht wanted his audience to focus on how an outcome came about, not on what the outcome was. To achieve this, his plays give routinely and deliberately future events and outcomes away. Often there are spoken verses before the beginning of a new scene or episode that bluntly tell the audience what is going to happen. This was part of his self-imposed principle he called "epic theatre".

* AlternateShowInterpretation: Modern performances of his plays almost demand this trope, to keep the audience alienized, as Brecht wanted it. Common tactics include the use of words projected onto a screen (one of Brecht's favourite tactics), having the actors protest their stage directions, having the actors switch roles halfway through, using minimalist sets, and name-checking Brecht. One memorable Berlin performance of "St. Joan" (in the Deutsches Theater) started out with four actors fighting over who got to play which character, all reading from cheap paperback copies of the play. Once they finally all managed to get a private part in the play, they found themselves stuck in the middle of a tragic plot, and desperately tried to stop being these characters again (with varying levels of success). Meanwhile, the actors and a miniature cardboard cityscape were filmed on live and projected onto a screen, with the SFX crew clearly visible, and as the plot got more dramatic, the floor disappeared from under the actors, slowly forcing them back towards the screen. On which a counter was displayed showing how many people had died of poverty and hunger worldwide during the performance of the play alone. Oh, and? It didn't change or add a single word from Brecht's original script. The whole thing was a huge SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome.

* AsceticAesthetic: Brecht wanted his plays to be enjoyed intellectually, not sensually and therefore avoided lavish costumes, scenery and decorations, and everything else that would allow the audience to wallow in sensual pleasure. As protest against grandiose "bourgeois" theatre, Brecht's own productions strove for this trope instead, avoiding the pageantry and spectacle of his contemporaries. People who saw his own production of his plays, especially when he had his own theatre after World War Two, actually found that the costumes and scenery had their own austere beauty.

While not particularly noted for being a wit, he did get some moments of [[DeadpanSnarker snark]] in, most famously his criticism of the Stalinist track of UsefulNotes/EastGermany post-war: "Would it not be be simpler / If the government dissolved the people / And elected another?"

One of his most important principles is of course, ''Verfremdungseffekt'', or "effect of alienation". This was a method which discouraged immersion and escapism, and encouraged critical reception. This was often subject to {{Flanderization}} in pseudo-Brechtian productions but in Brecht's works alienation was against immersion and identification with characters but heightened immersion and attention to the social interactions, drama and context of character's choices and actions, this was part of the Marxist ideology of showing society, economics and politics at work in human relations. This made Brecht an early precursor to what we would call PostModernism, the use of such effects, most directly in BreakingTheFourthWall and talking to the audiences is often called in film classes as a 'Brechtian Device'. His stories were not meant as escapist fiction, but as scathing caricatures of what was wrong in society. For this reason, he developed certain tricks to prevent escapism: he encouraged his audiences to smoke while watching each play, discouraged method acting in his ensemble (he preferred using the classic, basic characters of the CommediaDellArte), used off-key instruments, and made his props out of flimsy cardboard. In short, he was a master of StylisticSuck, such as tragedies ending with an unconvincing HappyEnding, a woman who tragically sings out that she really does value money more than her man and pithy references on why "Robbing a bank isn't as big a crime as owning one."

* AsceticAesthetic: Brecht wanted his plays to be enjoyed intellectually, not sensually and therefore avoided lavish costumes, scenery and decorations, and everything else that would allow the audience to indulge in sensual pleasure. As protest against grandiose "bourgeois" theatre, Brecht's own productions strove for this trope instead, avoiding the pageantry and spectacle of his contemporaries. People who saw his own production of his plays, especially when he had his own theatre after World War Two, actually found that the costumes and scenery had their own austere beauty.