The Rough Theatre
“The Rough theatre is something more experimental”. This means that we already have moved into a different type of theatre that Peter Brook has guided us into it from his book “The Empty Space”. In better words, this is a simpler form of theatre than the ones we studied before such as the deadly thatre and the holly theatre, what makes the rough theatre different than the obvious theatres is that “through the ages it has taken many forms, and there is only one factor that they all have in commonness--- a roughness”.
I would rather call it a vivid, noisy, lively, flexible, and very creative theatre.
You can touch and feel the real meaning of owning the space “The Stage” and being all comfortable with any new, quick changes in terms of plays, directors, and the actors themselves are more free with their expreissions but noticebly they are not limited as how we examined in the first two chapters. In this type of theatres, you can easily see it’s not a complicated space and it’s pretty much open for audiences joining in, answering back, and sitting around tables, theatre in back rooms, upstairs rooms. So, we can all notice the difference when we come to compare rough theatre vs the deadly or holly theatre; also it is simpler and clearer to understand its plays and the purpose behind each character, and each story whether it was musical, tragedy, comedy; ect. Brook also mentioned: “The strongest comedy is rooted archetypes, in mythology in basic recurrent situations; and inevitably it is deeply embedded in the social tradition. Comedy does not always stem from the main flow of a social argument: it is through different comic traditions branch away in many directions: for a certain time, although the course is out of sight, the stream continues to flow on, then one day, unexpectedly, it dries up completely: (Brook,70).
Clearly back to the main point where I started we pretty much see Peter Brook is defining the rough theatre with an imaginary describition specially when he said at the very first pargaph from this chapter when he says : “Its salt, sweat, noise, smell: the theatre that's not in a theatre, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables, audiences joining in, answering back: theatre in back rooms, upstairs rooms, barns: the one-night stands, the torn sheet pinned up across the hall."
“Rough theatre is something more experimental. It isn't incredibly conventional; simple things are used to create a performance. There is a lightheartedness to rough theatre, but rebellion and opposition feed it (Brook, 70). “This is a militant energy: it is the energy of anger, sometimes the energy of hate” (Brook, 70). In rough theatre, opinions are imposed that evoke different emotions and reactions from different audience members. A director of rough theatre must think of views other than their to own to form their message. In Modern American Drama, the goal of playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, and Clifford Odets was to evoke social change. To accomplish such a task involves alienation—isolating different places or groups or people and showing the damage directly. This type of risky theatre is still written and performed today. Risky theatre is so important in our society because “all through the world in order to save the theatre almost everything of the theatre still has to be swept away. The process has hardly begun, and perhaps can never end. The theatre needs its perpetual revolution” (Brook, 96).
In this chapter Brook talked in brief about multiple important authors, directors and playwrights who were such an important and remarkable influence on rough theatre and developed it in terms of growth, people’ life, society changes, and political issues or challenges which it was a sensitive area to talk about back then because the idea of revolutionary theatre started to take a big role since then.
He was a German poet, playwright, theatre director, andMarxist. A theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made contributions to dramatically and theatrical production, the latter through the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble – the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife, long-time collaborator and actress Helene Weigel.
“Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria (about 80 km or 50 mi north-west of Munich), to a devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father (who had been persuaded to have a Protestant wedding). The modest house where he was born is today preserved as a Brecht Museum. His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would have a lifelong effect on his writing. From her, too, came the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama. Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied. At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a lifelong creative partnership, Neher designing many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helping to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre.
When he was 16, the First World War broke out. Initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates "swallowed by the army".On his father's recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for an additional medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917 There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star Frank Wedekind.”
Theory and practice of theatre
From his late twenties Brecht remained a lifelong committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his "epic theatre", synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism.
Statue of Brecht outside the Berliner Ensemble's theatre in Berlin.
Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. Brecht thought that the experience of a climactic catharsis of emotion left an audience complacent. Instead, he wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognize social injustice and exploitation and to be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside. For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such, was changeable.
Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the "epic form" of the drama. This dramatic form is related to similar modernist innovations in other arts, including the strategy of divergent chapters in James Joyce's novel Ulysses, Sergei Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist "montage" in the cinema, and Picasso's introduction of cubist "collage" in the visual arts.
One of Brecht's most important principles was what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "demilitarization effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement effect", and often mistranslated as "alienation effect"). This involved, Brecht wrote, "stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them" To this end, Brecht employed techniques such as the actor's direct address to the audience, harsh and bright stage lighting, the use of songs to interrupt the action, explanatory placards, and, in rehearsals, the transposition of text to the third person or past tense, and speaking the stage directions out loud.
Another effective playwrite who had an important role when the rough theatre was founded is (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov ):
“He was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years.”
“While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888.”
“In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation about the life of prisoners. His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera.”
“Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard," he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. There he was visited by writers Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, and artists Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan.”
I would rather call it a vivid, noisy, lively, flexible, and very creative theatre.
You can touch and feel the real meaning of owning the space “The Stage” and being all comfortable with any new, quick changes in terms of plays, directors, and the actors themselves are more free with their expreissions but noticebly they are not limited as how we examined in the first two chapters. In this type of theatres, you can easily see it’s not a complicated space and it’s pretty much open for audiences joining in, answering back, and sitting around tables, theatre in back rooms, upstairs rooms. So, we can all notice the difference when we come to compare rough theatre vs the deadly or holly theatre; also it is simpler and clearer to understand its plays and the purpose behind each character, and each story whether it was musical, tragedy, comedy; ect. Brook also mentioned: “The strongest comedy is rooted archetypes, in mythology in basic recurrent situations; and inevitably it is deeply embedded in the social tradition. Comedy does not always stem from the main flow of a social argument: it is through different comic traditions branch away in many directions: for a certain time, although the course is out of sight, the stream continues to flow on, then one day, unexpectedly, it dries up completely: (Brook,70).
Clearly back to the main point where I started we pretty much see Peter Brook is defining the rough theatre with an imaginary describition specially when he said at the very first pargaph from this chapter when he says : “Its salt, sweat, noise, smell: the theatre that's not in a theatre, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables, audiences joining in, answering back: theatre in back rooms, upstairs rooms, barns: the one-night stands, the torn sheet pinned up across the hall."
“Rough theatre is something more experimental. It isn't incredibly conventional; simple things are used to create a performance. There is a lightheartedness to rough theatre, but rebellion and opposition feed it (Brook, 70). “This is a militant energy: it is the energy of anger, sometimes the energy of hate” (Brook, 70). In rough theatre, opinions are imposed that evoke different emotions and reactions from different audience members. A director of rough theatre must think of views other than their to own to form their message. In Modern American Drama, the goal of playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, and Clifford Odets was to evoke social change. To accomplish such a task involves alienation—isolating different places or groups or people and showing the damage directly. This type of risky theatre is still written and performed today. Risky theatre is so important in our society because “all through the world in order to save the theatre almost everything of the theatre still has to be swept away. The process has hardly begun, and perhaps can never end. The theatre needs its perpetual revolution” (Brook, 96).
In this chapter Brook talked in brief about multiple important authors, directors and playwrights who were such an important and remarkable influence on rough theatre and developed it in terms of growth, people’ life, society changes, and political issues or challenges which it was a sensitive area to talk about back then because the idea of revolutionary theatre started to take a big role since then.
He was a German poet, playwright, theatre director, andMarxist. A theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made contributions to dramatically and theatrical production, the latter through the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble – the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife, long-time collaborator and actress Helene Weigel.
“Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria (about 80 km or 50 mi north-west of Munich), to a devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father (who had been persuaded to have a Protestant wedding). The modest house where he was born is today preserved as a Brecht Museum. His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would have a lifelong effect on his writing. From her, too, came the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama. Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied. At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a lifelong creative partnership, Neher designing many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helping to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre.
When he was 16, the First World War broke out. Initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates "swallowed by the army".On his father's recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for an additional medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917 There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star Frank Wedekind.”
Theory and practice of theatre
From his late twenties Brecht remained a lifelong committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his "epic theatre", synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism.
Statue of Brecht outside the Berliner Ensemble's theatre in Berlin.
Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. Brecht thought that the experience of a climactic catharsis of emotion left an audience complacent. Instead, he wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognize social injustice and exploitation and to be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside. For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such, was changeable.
Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the "epic form" of the drama. This dramatic form is related to similar modernist innovations in other arts, including the strategy of divergent chapters in James Joyce's novel Ulysses, Sergei Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist "montage" in the cinema, and Picasso's introduction of cubist "collage" in the visual arts.
One of Brecht's most important principles was what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "demilitarization effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement effect", and often mistranslated as "alienation effect"). This involved, Brecht wrote, "stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them" To this end, Brecht employed techniques such as the actor's direct address to the audience, harsh and bright stage lighting, the use of songs to interrupt the action, explanatory placards, and, in rehearsals, the transposition of text to the third person or past tense, and speaking the stage directions out loud.
Another effective playwrite who had an important role when the rough theatre was founded is (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov ):
“He was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years.”
“While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888.”
“In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation about the life of prisoners. His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera.”
“Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard," he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. There he was visited by writers Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, and artists Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan.”
Works Cited
4- The Empty Space, book by Peter Brook.
Thank you, very useful.
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