Strasberg on Brecht
For anyone sympathetic to Bertolt Brecht, proponent of the ‘Alienation Effect,' it would seem unlikely that the evangelist of 'the Method,' Lee Strasberg, would have much of value to say about him. But in fact Strasberg had a better understanding of Brecht’s work, at least his work as a director, than one might imagine and realizing this gives us a more rounded sense of Strasberg’s own contribution to twentieth century theatre. But it was still far from an adequate understanding. In realizing how it fell short, we also get a sharper sense of Brecht’s contribution, which is ultimately much greater than Strasberg’s.
This is a big topic which I can’t handle in the space of a typical post. What follows here is just the beginning of a full-scale essay, with only the first five hundred or so words posted. If you’re interested enough to keep reading, just click the link at the end to access the complete essay, or you can go straight to it HERE.
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Towards the end of A Dream of Passion, Lee Strasberg discusses the relation of the Method to what he calls “nonrealistic styles”. It was important to him that Method acting should not be limited in people’s minds or, worse, in actual practice to naturalistic drama, although naturalistic drama had provided the main context for the ground-breaking work of Stanislavski from which the Method is derived. Strasberg’s admiration for the work of Vakhtangov was rooted in the latter’s extension of Stanislavski’s approach into more ‘theatrical’ (that is, less austerely naturalistic) production styles. Hence the penultimate chapter of Strasberg’s one and only theoretical work is not merely a response to a growing ‘anti-realist’ theatrical movement in the 1960s and 1970s, though it was provoked by this, but is consistent with the broader scope of his ambition from an early stage of his career.
Strasberg focuses on the ideas and work of three key figures whose influence on the ‘anti-realism’ of the sixties and seventies was especially strong: Artaud, Grotowski and Brecht. (Brecht considered himself a realist, of course – and with good reason. What Strasberg seems to mean by ‘realism’ is naturalism, which certainly excludes Brecht.) My focus in this essay is Strasberg’s strong endorsement – and appropriation – of Brecht. “The work of Brecht remains for me probably the most significant from a theatrical point of view since Stanislavsky and Vakhtangov,” he writes (196). He then pairs Brecht with Vakhtangov, seeing each as seeking to open up and go beyond the more limited frame of Stanislavski, but without sacrificing the latter’s concern with truthfulness in acting. Thus he concludes: “Brecht’s ‘non-Aristotelian’ theory of theatre is represented mainly in his playwriting; the best part of his work with actors derives from Stanislavsky and perhaps even uses the techniques of the Method” (197).
This is a surprising conclusion, to say the least. We might simply dismiss it, as Elly Konijn does in Acting Emotions: Shaping Emotions on Stage, as mere evidence of the way that, in the ‘vague’ field of acting theory, what some see as diametrically opposed, others see as closely allied (15-16). But this misses the main point: on the face of it, Brecht’s ideas about acting and its function are very different from Strasberg’s, but what Strasberg is responding to here is the very high quality of performance achieved by Brecht the director. And this, of course, poses the following problem: what is the relationship between those ideas and that achievement?
Strasberg’s ‘solution,’ as quoted above, is this: Brecht’s directorial approach to acting was broadly consonant with the principles of the Method, while his goal of Verfremdung (making the familiar strange) was largely written into his plays. This is certainly wrong. But I would stress here that Strasberg does not do what many have done, that is, set up some supposed contradiction between Brechtian theory and Brechtian practice; implicitly, he recognizes their consistency. Thus, he asserts that “what Brecht meant by distancing was a way of communicating a feeling to the audience without necessarily indulging in the same intensity of experience demanded in plays with a psychological emphasis” (194). In what follows I shall argue that this formulation is nearly (but still not quite) right, although Strasberg’s broader account of Brecht is misleading.
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