The Caucasian Chalk Circle, at its essence, is a play in which Brecht brings out the idea of negligence and irresponsibility. In the war-ravaged Grusinia, the leaders are portrayed as not only being indifferent to the cry of their subjects but...

The nature of the environment around us is governed by the sciences. Chemical reactions can be represented by equations, specific bonds form between certain molecules, and organisms act based upon biological processes. In a world where people can...

It is a volatile point in history: the intersection of science and religion at the height of the Inquisition; it is a time when the Church reigns and a man, a physicist, must choose life or death, himself or science. Galileo Galilei's legendary...

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) lived in a period when Europe went through the most massive economic, political, and social changes. He witnessed the two World Wars, the revolutions in Austria, Germany, Hungary in 1917-1918, the uprising of Communism...

Brecht’s development of epic theatre challenged many aspects of the popular conventions of naturalism and expressionism that were prevalent during his rise to prominence in the 1920s. In The Life of Galileo, elements of epic theatre such as the...

German playwright Bertolt Brecht developed his theory of epic theatre as a response to the renaissance of Aristotelian tragic theatre in the latter part of the 1920s (Hecht, 40). Where Aristotle allowed the audience of his theatre the purgation of...

"When something seems the most obvious thing in the world, it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up." How does Brecht attempt to ensure that the obvious is absent from this play?

Brecht's intentions when writing Mother...

"The term gender is commonly used to refer to the psychological, cultural, and social characteristics that distinguish the sexes" (Cook 1). From the idea of gender such notions as gender bias and stereotyping have developed. Stereotypes have lead...

Writing in the Germany of the 1920s, Brecht shattered the then staple notions of dramatic theatre, with his propagation of the Epic theatre. In terms of play righting, his was a move away from the Isben model of the well made play; in terms of...

Berthold Brecht’s explicit intention to impose an emotional distance between dramatic actors and the viewing audience stands in opposition to the use of propagandistic techniques intended to heighten sympathy and runs contrary to notions of...

Although Waiting for Godot and Mother Courage and Her Children are quite different in terms of plot structure and setting, there are similarities present in the use of bleak imagery as symbols of religious, social, and political criticism. The...

Mute characters play a significant role in plays. They are the characters most people would ignore because they do not say anything; however, mute characters may be the characters who say the most in a play. Within Mother Courage and Her Children...

While there is still confusion over the exact causes of the Thirty Years' War, everyone can acknowledge how horrific and devastating it was. Enormous amounts of civilians in besieged cities such as Magdeburg lost their lives, and those who...

When it was released in 1937, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children was heralded as one of the great anti-war plays of that still young century. But while martial and religious themes are certainly visible through the narrative,...

In The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, by Bertolt Brecht, a violent gang gains power through the vegetable trade, attaining near dictatorial status in a chillingly short amount of time. One thing leads to another in a rapid sequence of events that...

In a 1929 review of The Threepenny Opera, Felix Salten wrote:

...the young Weill’s music is as characteristic as Brecht’s language, as electrifying in its rhythm as the lines of the poems, as deliberately and triumphantly trivial and full of...

Cinema changed everything: This is an accepted statement, but it is also a cliché. At the same time, it cannot be overstated enough. When it comes to an experimental innovator such as Bertolt Brecht, however, the form of cinema transformed the...

“Epic theatre’s basic effort is to make familiar strange, show the world as alterable, hold events at a temporal distance and as Bretch writes, reveal the human being as “as the sum of all circumstances”.”Alisa Solman

In response to the political...

Lennox (1978) argues that Brecht was “unable to see real women in their full dimensions” perhaps due to “a terror of women like that possessed by many men”. Accepting this, Brecht’s portrayal of women is in terms of stereotypes only slightly...

Literature often presents itself in different themes and messages for audience members. These themes may be reoccurring or even opposing at times between different texts. The play The Good Person of Szchecwan by Bertolt Brecht and Autobiography of...