A Short Organum for the Theatre Bertolt Brecht (1948) PROLOGUE aesthetic concepts enough weapons to defend them- selves against the aesthetics of the Press they sim- HE following sets out to define an aesthetic ply threatened ’to transform the means of enjoyment drawn from a particular kind of theatrical per- T into an instrument of instruction, and to convert cer- formance which has been worked out in practice tain amusement establishments into organs of mass over the past few decades. In the theoretical state- communication’ (’Notes to the opera Mahagonny’ ments, excursions, technical indications occasion- — [see No. 13]): i.e. to emigrate from the realm of ally published in the form of notes to the writer’s the merely enjoyable. Aesthetics, that heirloom of a plays, aesthetics have only been touched on casu- by now depraved and parasitic class, was in such a ally and with comparative lack of interest. There lamentable state that a theatre would certainly have you saw a particular species of theatre extending or gained both in reputation and in elbowroom if it contracting its social functions, perfecting or sifting had rechristened itself thaeter. And yet what we its artistic methods and establishing or maintaining achieved in the way of theatre for a scientific age its aesthetics — if the question arose — by reject- was not science but theatre, and the accumulated in- ing or converting to its own use the dominant con- novations worked out during the Nazi period and ventions of morality or taste according to its tactical the war — when practical demonstration was im- needs. This theatre justified its inclination to social possible — compel some attempt to set this species commitment by pointing to the social commitment of theatre in its aesthetic background, or anyhow to in universally accepted works of art, which only fail sketch for it the outlines of a conceivable aesthetic. to strike the eye because it was the accepted com- To explain the theory of theatrical alienation except mitment. As for the products of our own time, it within an aesthetic framework would be impossibly held that their lack of any worthwhile content was awkward. a sign of decadence: it accused these entertainment Today one could go so far as to compile an aes- emporiums of having degenerated into branches of thetics of the exact sciences. Galileo spoke of the the bourgeois narcotics business. The stage’s inac- elegance of certain formulae and the point of an ex- curate representations of our social life, including periment; Einstein suggests that the sense of beauty those classed as so-called Naturalism, led it to call has a part to play in the making of scientific discov- for scientifically exact representations; the tasteless eries; while the atomic physicist R. Oppenheimer rehashing of empty visual or spiritual palliatives, for praises the scientific attitude, which ’has its own the noble logic of the multiplication table. The cult kind of beauty and seems to suit mankind’s position of beauty, conducted with hostility towards learn- on earth’. ing and contempt for the useful, was dismissed by Let us therefore cause general dismay by revok- it as itself contemptible, especially as nothing beau- ing our decision to emigrate from the realm of the tiful resulted. The battle was for a theatre fit for merely enjoyable, and even more general dismay by the scientific age, and where its planners found it announcing our decision to take up lodging there. too hard to borrow or steal from the armoury of BERTOLT BRECHT 1 A Short Organum for the Theatre Let us treat the theatre as a place of entertainment, what it brought over from the mysteries was not its as is proper in an aesthetic discussion, and try to former ritual function, but purely and simply the discover which type of entertainment suits us best. pleasure which accompanied this. And the cathar- sis of which Aristotle writes — cleansing by fear 1 and pity, or from fear and pity — is a purification ’Theatre’ consists in this: in making live represen- which is performed not only in a pleasurable way, tations of reported or invented happenings between but precisely for the purpose of pleasure. To ask human beings and doing so with a view to entertain- or to accept more of the theatre is to set one’s own ment. At any rate that is what we shall mean when mark too low. we speak of theatre, whether old or new. 5 2 Even when people speak of higher and lower de- To extend this definition we might add happenings grees of pleasure, art stares impassively back at between humans and gods, but as we are only seek- them; for it wishes to fly high and low and to be left ing to establish the minimum we can leave such in peace, so long as it can give pleasure to people. matters aside. Even if we did accept such an ex- tension we should still have to say that the ’theatre’ 6 set-up’s broadest function was to give pleasure. It Yet there are weaker (simple) and stronger (com- is the noblest function that we have found for ’the- plex) pleasures which the theatre can create. The atre’. last-named, which are what we are dealing with in great drama, attain their climaxes rather as cohab- 3† itation does through love: they are more intricate, From the first it has been the theatre’s business to richer in communication, more contradictory and entertain people, as it also has of all the other arts. more productive of results. It is this business which always gives it its particu- lar dignity; it needs no other passport than fun, but 7 this it has got to have. We should not by any means And different periods’ pleasures varied naturally be giving it a higher status if we were to turn it e.g. according to the system under which people lived into a purveyor of morality; it would on the contrary in society at the time. The Greek demos [literally: run the risk of being debased, and this would occur the demos of the Greek circus] ruled by tyrants had at once if it failed to make its moral lesson enjoy- to be entertained differently from the feudal court able, and enjoyable to the senses at that: a princi- of Louis XIV. The theatre was required to deliver ple, admittedly, by which morality can only gain. different representations of men’s life together: not Not even instruction can be demanded of it: at any just representations of a different life, but also rep- rate, no more utilitarian lesson than how to move resentations of a different sort. pleasurably, whether in the physical or in the spiri- 8 tual sphere. The theatre must in fact remain some- thing entirely superfluous, though this indeed means According to the sort of entertainment which was that it is the superfluous for which we live. Nothing possible and necessary under the given conditions needs less justification than pleasure. of men’s life together the characters had to be given varying proportions, the situations to be constructed 4† according to varying points of view. Stories have to Thus what the ancients, following Aristotle, de- be narrated in various ways, so that these particular manded of tragedy is nothing higher or lower than Greeks may be able to amuse themselves with the that it should entertain people. Theatre may be said inevitability of divine laws where ignorance never to be derived from ritual, but that is only to say mitigates the punishment; these French with the that it becomes theatre once the two have separated; graceful self-discipline demanded of the great ones BERTOLT BRECHT 2 A Short Organum for the Theatre of this earth by a courtly code of duty; the English- they rely little. Thus the greater part of our enjoy- men of the Elizabethan age with the self-awareness ment is drawn from other sources than those which of the new individual personality which was then our predecessors were able to exploit so fully. We uncontrollably bursting out. are left safely dependent on beauty of language, on elegance of narration, on passages which stimulate 9 our own private imaginations: in short, on the inci- And we must always remember that the plea- dentals of the old works. These are precisely the po- sure given by representations of such different sorts etical and theatrical means which hide the impreci- hardly ever depended on the representation’s like- sions of the story. Our theatres no longer have either ness to the thing portrayed. Incorrectness, or con- the capacity or the wish to tell these stories, even the siderable improbability even, was hardly or not at relatively recent ones of the great Shakespeare, at all all disturbing, so long as the incorrectness had a clearly: i.e. to make the connection of events cred- certain consistency and the improbability remained ible. And according to Aristotle — and we agree of a constant kind. All that mattered was the illu- there — narrative is the soul of drama. We are more sion of compelling momentum in the story told, and and more disturbed to see how crudely and care- this was created by all sorts of poetic and theatrical lessly men’s life together is represented, and that means. Even today we are happy to overlook such not only in old works but also in contemporary ones inaccuracies if we can get something out of the spir- constructed according to the old recipes. Our whole itual purifications of Sophocles or the sacrificial acts way of appreciation is starting to get out of date.