Performance

We felt that we wanted to provoke our audience and to be true to the Brechtain ideals we know to be of importance to us. In order to do this we needed to play with the audiences specific reaction to certain characters that invoke extreme reactions. In Brechtain terms context is all - in other words the importance lies not just in the characters that you place but also the situation in which you place them. Following the idea of Gestus, if you place a strong character in a completely unexpected situation the effect on an audience can be alienating, but also incredibly powerful and provoking as well. One of our characters was Hitler. Now if Hitler is placed in an environment that you expect to see him in, ie surrounded by members of The Third Reich or giving a speech to the Hitler Youth, the impact is strong but not unexpected. However if a powerful character like Hitler is placed in a totally different situation, like for instance in a dating game like take me out the effect can hopefully be at once disorientating, funny and provocative. If you take another character like Anne Frank whose context one would expect to be with her Jewish family hiding in the family loft hiding from the Nazis and place her in a dating game too, this effect would also be intriguing. Yet if then you put the characters of Hitler and Anne Frank together, as we did at the end of our piece this would dramatically create the contradictory and powerful feelings that Brecht created so successfully with his audiences.

The other huge advantage of using characters such as Hitler and Anne Frank, is that you create a political dialogue within the piece that you can use to deliberately provoke an audience. We attempted to play with the audiences universal attitude towards one character, in this case being the character of Hitler. The context in which we placed him, that of a dating game also provokes a specific response in the audience. Finally the character of Anne Frank can be seen to provoke a universal response from an audience. So, we have a character everyone despises (Hitler), a character everyone sympathies with (Anne Frank), two characters who are also from history, and we placed them in a modern context in a situation everyone recognizes. The audience would naturally expect the hated character to behave in a certain way and to receive his comeuppance. The audience would also expect the heroine to be seen in an entirely positive light. The fact that at the end of the piece the two characters go off together to enjoy their "date" hopefully provokes a plethora of responses. For instance the situation could be seen as funny yet at the same time the audience could almost feel angry that Anne Frank behaved sympathetically towards her historical tormentor. Equally Hitler's behavior could be seen to be surprising and frustrating - we want our villains to behave villainous and not to gain the sympathy of an audience. Or do we? Whatever the response the situation can be seen to be truly dramatic, and the variety of emotions invoked by the action is what drama is all about.