Brecht’s Lehrstücke and Drama Education

Abstract

The term Lehrstücke, or learning-plays, describes a series of experimental works written in the 1920s and early 1930s by Bertolt Brecht and a number of collaborators, including Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Elisabeth Hauptmann. The intention behind writing and performing these experimental plays was not necessarily to culminate in a finished, final product to be replicated exactly during each performance. Rather, the ideal Lehrstücke performance is also something of a rehearsal, or, as Frederic Jameson (1998) describes it, ‘one continuous master class’ (p. 62–63). Jameson suggests that the process of acting in a Lehrstücke is the end result: ‘the decision to act out this particular gesture; or not to act it out, or to act out its opposite–now proves to be the annulment of difference on another, and perhaps even more basic, one: namely, that between actors and public’ (p. 65). As performer and audience are synthesized, this opens up a new realm of possibilities for action and choice within the framework of the play.