Writing Assignment 3: The "Alienating Effects" of Brecht's Staging

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The "Alienating Effects" of Brecht's Staging
According to Brecht (91), his usage of the alienation effect or Verfremdung was inspired from the traditional Chinese acting where there are attempts within the play that obstructs the audiences focus on the play and create an effort to represent the characters as strange to the play's viewers. Brecht meant to use the alienation effect to prevent the audience to loose themselves within the opera and remind the audience that they are just watching a theatre act (93). Additionally, this effect was incorporated in most German plays during that era to evolve the conventional style of German plays into an epic theatre (91). Brecht usually try to let the viewer focus on the play's situation and let the people watching ponder on the part that Brecht selected as an object of criticism (121). However, Brecht may had misinterpreted the representation of the alienation effect in Chinese drama since Brecht's knowledge concerning Chinese plays are limited (Tian, 201).
According to Bradley (7), the Verfremdungseffekt, precisely translated as estrangement effect, is a method of insinuating the theater audience with critical thinking and provoking the viewers to question the issue or phenomena that the mases usually take for granted. Translating Verfremdung as alienation can be misleading to the non-German speaking readers since alienation implies the rejection of emotion (7). The Verfremdungseffekt, on the other hand, wants to let the characters of the play to create a full range of emotions, and Brecht wants the audience to retain sufficient critical detachment for the viewers to analyze their new found emotional experience (7). Although this method of letting the audience ponder their emotions during the 1930s, the Verfremdungseffekt still have an impact in contemporary audiences since it is still an important tool in creating social and political awareness to the viewers. People needs to regain awareness to tackle the imminent social problems in the modern era such as increased rates of poverty, joblessness, gender discrimination, and different forms of abuse that the government is too slow to address.
Evidence of Marxism in The Threepenny Opera
Brecht preferred Marxism as a political philosophy (Barnett, 19). For Brecht, the most important features of Marxism include: tackling of social inequalities of society and proposing ways to overcome these inequalities; reforming the flawed system of capitalism and favor socialism; and, solving change in economic instability through social conflict or dialectic materialism (19). In Brecht's opera, "The Three Penny Opera," the setting is targeted at the time when the new queen of England is about to be coronated. This shows that the form of government in the play ruled by a monarch. Mr. Peachum asked the chief of police of London, Jackie "Tiger" Brown to capture, imprison, and hang Macheath "Mackie" since Macheath married Mr. Peachum's daughter. Mr. Peachum threatened the chief of police that if Mackie was not captured by the day of the Queen's coronation, he will rally his army of beggars and synthesize a revolution towards the Queen where Mr. Peachum will use the poor's needs and creat...