In the inter-war period in Germany, the director Erwin Piscator developed a new theatrical form, ‘epic theatre’, aiming to spread his socialist political message. He employed radical new staging techniques and influenced many other theatre-makers.
Erwin Piscator (Q72) was born in 1893, and started a career as an actor before being drafted into the German army during the First World War. His battlefield experience inspired a hatred of militarism and war that lasted for the rest of his life. After the war, he joined the Communist Party of Germany, and formed a theatre company, going on to become stage director at the Volksbühne Berlin (1924-1927, Q8354), and later managing director at his own theatre, the Berlin Piscator-Bühne on Nollendorfplatz (Q30633). Piscator created performances by playwrights such as Ernst Toller and Walter Mehring, with artists including Bertolt Brecht (Q69), George Grosz and John Heartfield. He developed an approach to staging designed to promote his political agenda, and coined the term ‘epic theatre’ to describe it during his first year as director of the Volksbühne.
The term epic theatre does not refer to the scale of the production, but to a new way Piscator wanted the audience to engage with it – not to suspend their disbelief, but to see their world as it is. He used montages of many media and effects, such as revolving stages, photograph and film projection, moving scenic elements and scaffolding structures on stage instead of conventional scenery. The combination of fragmented and simultaneous acting scenes, and in-view scene changes created an effect of documentary, rather than a fictional dramatic world. Aesthetics and emotions were not the aim, but were harnessed to the political purpose.
Piscator wrote Das Politische Theater (The Political Theatre) in 1929, containing discussions of the theory of theatre. He later wrote that it was intended to provide ‘a definitive explanation and elucidation of the basic facts of epic, i.e. political theatre’, which at that time ‘was still meeting with widespread rejection and misapprehension.’ Piscator’s writings were among those that influenced Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl, and their socialist theatre groups in the UK, Theatre of Action and the Theatre Union. Littlewood went on to form Theatre Workshop, which was hugely influential in Britain, and made use of Piscator’s epic theatre techniques in productions such as A Taste of Honey and Oh, What a Lovely War! (F.08). Piscator’s influence also spread through the people he worked with, most notably Bertolt Brecht, who went on to develop his own version of epic theatre, which spread around the globe through productions, play texts and other writings.
Piscator hoped to reach larger audiences by building a radical new theatre. He commissioned Walter Gropius (Q21731), the director of the Bauhaus (Q76), to create a design for a ‘total theatre’ with him (Q30631). The utopian plan envisaged three possible configurations: the viewing box, an arena and a circular stage enclosing the auditorium. Projectors were to offer the possibility of placing the audience in the middle of a demonstration, or of covering the ceiling with a starry sky. However, due to the enormous costs, the plans could not be realised. Not only that, but Piscator’s technical requirements at the Piscator-Bühne were so expensive the theatre could not survive financially, further hampered by the financial crisis and very high inflation of the 1920s and 1930s. After the collapse of the third Piscator-Bühne 1931, Piscator went to Moscow. With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Piscator’s stay became exile, and he later moved to France and the United States.
Piscator returned to West Germany in 1951 and in 1962 he was appointed manager and director of the Freie Volksbühne in West Berlin (Q30632). Until his death in 1966, Piscator was a major exponent of contemporary and documentary theatre, as well as influencing theatre movements involved in the many protests that took place internationally in 1968. In 1959, three decades after its first release, Piscator’s book Das Politische Theatre was republished. In the forward to the new edition, Piscator said that: The justification for epic techniques is no longer disputed by anyone, but there is considerable confusion about what should be expressed by these means. The functional character of these epic techniques, in other words their inseparability from a specific content (the specific content, the specific message determines the means and not vice versa!) has by now become largely obscured. So we are still standing at the starting blocks. The race is not yet on…
Although his ideas had been hugely influential in changing the way theatre is staged, he felt the political purpose of the techniques of epic theatre had been lost. Piscator substantially reshaped how we use technology and design to speak to an audience. As always, the content of the message depends on our aims as theatre-makers.