Even when S.'s theater had to put on naturalistic plays to satisfy the taste of the time the production endowed them with poetic features; it never descended to mere reportage. Whereas here in Germany even classical plays acquire no kind of splendor.
— Bertolt Brecht, 1952
Language can be considered one of the bases of drama. Most (western) plays utilize speeches and dialogue. One of the ways that the playwright reveals the personality of his or her characters, the attitudes of the community in which the play takes place, and presents the events which unfold, is by selecting and arranging the words the characters speak. Even in the everyday speech rhythms of the most naturalistic drama, this selection and arranging distinguishes the language of the play from naturally occurring speech which we might hear in a news program or documentary film.
Brecht and Stanislavski both take for granted that their actors had a certain mechanical competence in speech and diction. Clearly an actor must be able to project sufficiently so as to be heard in an auditorium, and must be able to sustain this somewhat artificial mode of vocal production for the run of the play. Various speech regionalisms may limit the roles for which an actor is considered. Other roles may require the ability to reproduce the dialect of a particular region or class. And of course a whole repertoire of works requires the performer to sing. These and other technical details are outside our current focus. Actors with specific technical needs may require the services of a speech pathologist, dialect coach, or singing teacher.
What we're concerned with here are ways of exploring and communicating the poetry in a play, the connection between the language and its scenic value, what it tells us about the character, context, and events of the play.
Stanislaviski's chief concern with regard to the words of a play were that they not be "mere" words, that the sounding of the words not become an empty exercise in vocal production or diction, but have psychological content. Brecht had a special term for units of communication in the theater (linguistic, behavioral, scenic). He termed this "Gestus" in German, which John Willett has translated as gest, in English. It means both the essence of what is being communicated, and the external form (in Willett's words "both gist and gesture"). For Brecht the essential of what was to be communicated always had a social component.
A gest, then, communicated something about the way people related in a specific context (historical, social, etc.).
One of the recurring themes in Brecht's writings about theatre is the effect on an audience's (or potential audience's) expectations or sensibilities, of developments in industry, technology, and popular culture. With regard to theatrical poetry, he believed that our hearing was being transformed by exposure to sounds of new machinery, and noted the influence of jazz, particularly as it represented in influx of popular culture into "serious" music. Brecht believed that a poetic theater did not need to be stylized in the sense of "unrealistic." He comments favorably, for instance, on the plays of W.H. Auden. He suggests that taking the subject matter of a psychological "problem" play, and setting it in verse produces a different attitude toward the problem and its treatment of the psychological aspect.
Brecht opposed the use of a "stage diction" that had no basis in everyday speech. While this may be more of a problem in German where there is a tradition of using a particular type of articulation on the stage, it can be found in the US among actors who try to overcome regionalisms by affecting an incomplete British accent. Brecht wanted his actors to pay attention to everyday speech mannerisms and dialects. “Only so can they speak verse truly as verse or deliver heightened prose without destroying the character and situation of their part.” While acknowledging that clarity of speech was important, he distinguished between the kind of clarity with which one peasant might speak in contrast to another peasant, over against the clarity of speech of, say, an engineer. The social distinctions, in other words – the ways in which occupation, economic status, and other social groupings affect speech.
© 2009 H. Clark Kee