R R A U - Research

Assessment Week Work
UAL Level 3 Performing & Production Arts
The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui Initial Research As always, we are looking for Pointless Research!! (research that no-one else has found)
Find out some biographical information about Bertholt Brecht – who was he, where and when did he live etc. What was the environment that caused him to have the ideas that he did?
Brecht was a German poet, playwright and theatrical reformer. His concern to encourage the audience to think rather feel and be too involved with the storyline of the play made him easily one of the most prominent figures in the 20th century theatre.    Bertholt Brecht was born in 1898 in Augsburg, Germany, to a director of a paper company father and a civil servant mother. His father was Catholic and mother Protestant. Brecht started to write his poetry when he was just a little boy and didn’t enjoy school much. In 1917 he enrolled as a medical student at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he also started to attend a theatre seminar, which leads him to write theatre criticisms for the left-wing Socialist paper Die Augsburger. After returning from the military from being a medical orderly, Brecht ended his studies in 1921, but before this he had had time to write the play Baal in 1918(produced in 1923) and join the Independent Social Democratic party in 1919. His rise to international fame started with his play Trommeln in der Nacht (1922) which was awarded the Kleist Prize.   By 1929 Brecht had adopted the ideals of Communism, after starting to study Karl Marx’s Das Kapital a few years earlier.  In 1930’s Brecht plays and books were banned in Germany as well as theatre performances, and after burning of the Reichstag in Berlin, Brecht went into exile, first in Demark, where he stayed until 1939 and then settled in Helsinki, Finland as a guest of the Finnish author Hella Wuolijoki. Brecht found the sunny nights in Finland beautiful and wrote in his journal:  "i got up at three o'clock because of the flies, and went out. cocks were crowing, but it had not been dark. i like to relieve myself in the open ...". During his stay in Finland, Brecht wrote the play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and also collaborated with Wuolijoki on a folk-comedy Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti.     Brecht traveled with his family, as well as his mistress’s Danish actress Ruth Berlau and German writer, and Brecht secretary, Margarete Steffin, who both contributed to the plays Brecht wrote during his exile days. On their way to America trough Russia, Steffin died in Moscow because of tuberculosis. Once in USA, Brecht and his family settled in a small villa in Santa Monica, California. Brecht tried to get his plays into Broadway and sketched out around forty films for Hollywood. Only one of his plays, Hangmen Also Die (1942), received some acceptance. Brechts ideas were not taken seriously by the Hollywood movie moguls, and Brecht called Hollywood "intellectually isolated". After 15 years exile, Brecht returned to Germany in 1948. In 1949 he founded his own Marxist theatre, the Berliner Ensemble and the first play they performed was the Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti.
What is Epic Theatre? What are the aims of Epic Theatre and what are the techniques that Brecht suggests?
Epic theatre is a form of performance that aims to object the ‘Aristotelian’ theatre and so create a calm and detached contemplation and judgement of the themes of the play, politically criticising the world around us. Brecht believed that emotions would come in the way of pure judgement, and so the actors should only show certain recognisable gestures for their characters to be recognized by the audience, but constantly remind the audience they are in fact in a theatre. The illusion must be broken. He believed that the audience should be thinking, not feeling, and theatre as only mental entertainment is a waste of time. Dramatic theatre presents ideas as they would be happening in the present and from the hero’s point of view, whereas Epic Theatre tries to stay away from this, presenting the play as a narrative from the past, giving a report of events.    To discourage the audience from getting attached to the characters, Brecht believed that the actor should not impersonate, but to narrate their characters. They must not identify with them. Also, Brecht doesn't use music to heighten emotional climax, but as commentary generally leading to what is called a V-effect. The Verfremdungseffekt (V-effect, also known as 'alienation effect') is a mechanism to detach the audience from the characters by making their action strange, alienated, separate and remote. This is Brecht explanation of how the V-effect works: “A child whose mother remarries, seeing her as wife not just mother, or whose teacher is prosecuted, seeing him in relation to criminal law, experiences a V-effekt.”
When was the play written? What was happening at this time? Who was in power in Germany?  Find some biographical information about this ruler.
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a play written by Bertold Brecht in 1941. In the 1930's, plays and basically theatrical performance were banned in Germany, which lead Brecht to ran away first to Denmark and then in the 1940's to Finland where he wrote the play in three weeks while waiting to enter the United States.     During this time the Second World War had begun in 1939, but the rise of Hitler and his power over Germany had been prominent since 1921-23 when he started to gain a hero-like following as part of the political party National Socialists or Nazis. In 1933 the German people voted him as leader. After the First World War, Germany was crumbling economically and was in a social and political crisis, but the countries surrounding Germany were in weak and divided states as well, giving Germany the perfect chance to try for European domination once again. In 1939 1st of September, Hitler invaded Poland and two days after, France and Britain declared war against Germany. Even though this was the official start to WWII, Japan had already attacked China in 1937, in hopes of controlling Asia and Pacific. By the summer of 1940 German had invaded Holland, Belgium, France, Denmark and Norway, and were now trying to get to the south of England.         In Germany, the person in power at this time was Adolf Hitler. He was born in 1889 on the Austria-German border. He has been described to have been a hard working and popular student, until secondary school, where he lost his willingness to work and affection of other students. But he became very loyal to Germany from early on, as did many Austrian Germans, since they were taught extreme nationalism at school. At fifteen Hitler failed his exams, but rather than repeating the year he decided to drop out to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. This was also motivated by his fathers death, which gave him the freedom and money to live a bohemian life. At 18 he tried multiple times to get into an art school in Vienna, but was declined the place every time. At the outbreak of WWI, Adolf Hitler enlisted to the German army, but was wounded soon. After this he joined the German Workers' Party(DAP), where he proposed many extreme ideas to Germany's post-war problem, often blaming them on Jews and Bolsheviks. By 1921 he was the leader of National Socialist German Workers' Party or the Nazi party. After imprisonment, because of an unsuccessful armed uprising in Munich, Hitler used new techniques of mass communication and violence to grow the Nazi party bigger, and in the 1932 elections became the biggest party in the German parliament. Following being selected as the chancellor, Hitler soon declared dictatorship over German and started to reinforce anti-Jew laws, German militarisation and plan for territorial expansion.
What is happening in the world NOW that is similar to what is being explored in Arturo Ui?
Ukraine used to be a part of Soviet Union, but in 1991 when Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine became a country of its own. Since then the nation has been divided by opposing opinions on how the country should be governed. In February 2014 Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych was forced to step down and flee the country, after numerous protests of people being unhappy how the country was run. At this time Russian President Putin send thousands of soldiers to southern Ukraine, Crimea, to "protect Russian who live there". Troops also took over government buildings in this area, which grew tensions between Russia and countries, such as UK, US and France, opposing their actions. Many of the people in Crimea identify more as Russians than Ukrainians, which has been threatening the start of civil war in Ukraine, since both sides have been sending troops to the area and parts of eastern Ukraine, where there are still protest and fights between the Ukraine army and Russia supporters.    This sounds a lot like what was happening right at the beginning of WWII. Poland was at a weak state, both economically and politically, which gave Hitler the perfect chance to take over. "In the 1930s, Nazi Germany occupied part of neighbouring Czechoslovakia under the pretext of protecting ethnic Germans. Today, Russia is claiming to protect ethnic Russians… in Crimea or Georgian territories… Many in the West are talking about the need to reach some kind of compromise with Russia, an option that smacks of Munich 80 years ago." said the Washington post about the comparing Russia today and Nazi Germany of the 1930's. After the fall of USSR in 1991, Russia has been economically falling and it politically corrupt, which was the case with post WWI Germany. Germany had lost a lot of its land after the loss in WWI, was denied military forces and was left in tremendous amounts of debt. After Hitler got in power, he promised to regain the previous glory of Germany. He occupied part of Czechoslovakia first, claiming to protect the Germans there, but later in March 1939 he occupied the whole country. Since in the play the fate of the town Cicero is a straight representation of Anschluss, which was Hitler's and Nazi Germany's force occupation of Austria in March 1938. This rise of Hitler is is represented in the play by a Chicago gangster Arturo Ui.
Brecht was fascinated with the criminal underworld. Why did he set this play in Chicago in 1930’s? What was happening at that time in  USA and Chicago in particular?
Brecht never planned for the play to be performed in Germany, but hoped it to be performed in America, where the play was set. At the time he wrote the play, he was waiting for a visa to enter the USA, and there tried to make his break on Broadway and Hollywood, which is probably one of the reasons why the play was set in Chicago, to create that connection and understanding of the situation with American audiences. But one of the reasons was also, because what America and many countries(especially Germany)Europe were going through economic troubles.     In October 1929, the stock markets were hit by a tremendous crash, resulting in the Great Depression in America, but also in many other countries all over the world. Companies went bankrupt and banks closed down, and as people lost their jobs and income, depending on food hand outs, many turned to crime to get by. At this point, the Mafia were making money by distributing and selling alcohol, which had been prohibited in 1920 by the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Al Capone was the most famous and feared gangster of that time. He had settled in Chicago to take over Johnny Torrio's business of dealing outlawed liquor.  He had over 700 men working for him, and as he became richer, getting approximately $60 million per year by 1929, he was able to buy silence from politicians and eventually appoint his own mayor to the town Cicero, gaining control over this suburb area.    This sounds very familiar what Hitler did in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland right before WWII. I believe this is why Brecht chose to set the play in Chicago, USA, to make it easier for the American audience to relate and see his own view on Hitler, by comparing him to the most feared person in USA.
What is Commedia dell’Arte?
Commedia dell'Arte is a form of theatre originating from Italy. It was performed right next to the audience, usually in marketplaces and other busy areas, and to draw attention, but also make it clearer for people far away, the actors would use masks to show different stock characters. It was also very important for the actors to be completely physical to connect with the audience. The stories are focused on the relationships between masters and servants, where everyone is credulous and cunning, motivated by money, sex/love, and food/drink.