The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Bertolt Brecht (born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht) was born in 1898 in Ausburg, Germany. He was raised in a religious family: his father was Catholic, and his mother and grandmother (who also heavily influenced Brecht as a child) were both Protestants. While in school at Ausburg, Brecht befriended Caspar Neher. Neher would grow up to become his life-long collaborator, designing the sets for his plays that helped define the epic theater. Brecht is known for being the “father of epic theater,” which was his bold approach to staging his political views. He lived through both world wars, and lived in exile in the United States while Hitler was in power. He and his wife, actress Helene Weigel, founded the renowned Berliner Ensemble, which is still making theater to this day.

Brecht’s theatrical career initially began as a theatre critic in 1916. Over the next several years he came into contact with and worked alongside several artists who inspired his work. The first was the Munich comedian, Karl Valentin, who had a similar approach to the craft to Charlie Chaplin. In Berlin, he met Austrian playwright and director Arnolt Bronnen. The two formed a theatre company, and it is during this time that Brecht changed the spelling of his name to rhyme with Arnolt. Together, they formed the Arnon Bronnen/Bertolt Brecht Company. One of his most famous collaborations was with the composer Hanns Eisler, with whom he wrote The Threepenny Opera. After World War II, he and his wife formed the Berliner Ensemble together. Helene would go on to maintain the Ensemble after Brecht’s death.

Brecht’s most notable contribution to the theater art form is developing and popularizing epic theater (later also referred to as dialectic theater). The term “epic theater” was originally used by the German director Erwin Piscator in 1924. The ideology behind epic theater is to ask the audience to reach a more objective response to what they are seeing: the see the world as it is instead of using drama as a form of escapism.

The approach rose to popularity with Brecht, who utilized it to address urgent social and political issues. It is highly distinct from the realistic approach to drama seen from practitioners such as Russian playwright Stanislavsky. One of the most famous aspects of epic theater is the alienation effect, which is when the characters within the play purposely break the fourth wall to talk to the audience. Brecht’s epic theater also employed historicism, which drew parallels between a historical event and the present circumstances of our world, and a fragmented storyline. All three of these devices can be seen in The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Over the course of Brecht’s career, he penned a total of 31 plays. Some of his most notable works are In the Jungle of Cities, which upon its premiere in 1923, was met with whistles and stink bombs thrown onto the stage by Nazis. The Threepenny Opera was one of his more commercial successes and was written with the composer Hanns Eisler. Mother Courage and Her Children, Antigone, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle are all famous works by Brecht that are still performed widely across the globe to this day.

In addition to the legacy of his written works and his still operating Berliner Ensemble, Brecht has become a staple in theater education. His plays and books are studied in drama classrooms across the world. His influence on the potential of theater as a political forum is undeniable, and he is easily one of the most influential theater artists of all time.