Henrik Ibsen and Bertolt Brecht's dramatic ideas and techniques

Ibsen and Brecht

The live theater has a way of bringing the audience into the play like no other medium. Watching the actors on stage, the audience members all become voyeurs, who witness the secrets of lives behind closed doors. This is a wonderful thing when telling mysteries or comedies where the audience is asked to become part of the story. In dramas however, the playwright needs the audience to relate to the characters but to do so in a way that the message of the story has more merit than the characters themselves. To accomplish this, the playwright has to use certain techniques that will ensure the audience does not get so involved in the minutiae of the story that they lose the message of the larger picture. Playwrights Bertolt Brecht in "The Good Woman of Szechwan" and Henrik Ibsen in "Hedda Gabbler" use different techniques to achieve the same ends. In Brecht's work, he utilized distancing the audience from the smaller elements of the story and the individual characters in order to send the message of the given social issue expressed to the viewer of the play. Ibsen, antithetically, believed that by drawing the audience into the world of the characters, he could relate his position on a given social issue in a more palatable context.

The moral lesson of Bertolt Brecht's "The Good Woman of Szechwan" is the question about goodness in the world. Specifically, what happens when you find a genuinely good person in a world full of impurity and evil? Can real decency and goodness survive in a world where goodness is unappreciated and, when it is found, it is abused and overused to the point where the person has nothing left? In China, a group of gods are searching for goodness in the universe. The only place they have found even a trace of decency and a sense of charity is in the prostitute Shen Te. Only this woman who has almost nothing to offer, except for some shelter and a small amount of food, is willing to share anything at all. Those with the most to give to others are most often the people who are the least likely to share them with the less fortunate. To reward Shen Te and test the nature of her goodness, the gods give her a small amount of money with which she opens a tobacco shop in her village (Brecht). The gods want to see what will happen if you give reward to an individual who has never had disposable income. Being a truly good person, Shen Te uses the tobacco shop to help other people. She allows people to sleep there and she feeds the people who have nothing to eat. What eventually happens is that more and more people go to the tobacco shop to abuse Shen Te's generosity to the point where she has to create a fictional male cousin to get rid of some of the downtrodden. There is much confusion and Shen Te winds up on trial for her own murder. The ending of the play is left completely ambiguous. It is unknown whether or not Shen Te will be punished for the invention of a sterner personality or whether she can even go back to her kinder and gentler personality after having been exposed to cruelty. It is up to the viewer to mentally create their own conclusion to the work based on their own sensibilities.

Brecht distances the audience from the characters in the play in order to make this point about the nature of goodness. One way he does this is by setting his play in China. The idea of the Asian culture would be uncommon in the western world, particularly in the 1940s. By setting the play in Asia, Brecht makes the audience view the characters as other and therefore they should not be able to relate to the characters. He also achieves this through the way the ending of the play is written. Not showing the viewer how the trial goes forces the audience to write their own ending. This allows the people to understand that the play is a work of fiction and the characters in it are not real. However, it also leads to a discussion about whether or not she should be found guilty of murder and whether she can go back to her original life of peaceful goodness.

Hedda Gabbler is more concerned with the question of self-aggrandizement than goodness. The main protagonist of the piece is a woman who has just returned from her honeymoon and is already dissatisfied with her marriage (Ibsen). Hedda's defining characteristic is ambition. She knows that her academic husband will never achieve success so long as his rival produces more interesting and more important scholarly works. In order to remove this obstacle to her husband's success and her subsequent financial gain, she is willing to do whatever is necessary, even convincing that rival to commit suicide which would allow her to destroy his brilliant manuscript which has the ability to completely alter their field. When this does not work, Hedda commits suicide by shooting herself in the temple. Hedda is controlled by her desires and, until this point, she has never had difficulty getting exactly what she wants. Ibsen's lesson here is about the nature of desire and what people are willing to do in order to get the things they want. To this end, he creates a character who is really repellent. The audience cannot help but dislike Hedda and so they will not want to be like her. The best way to avoid being compared to a Hedda Gobbler is to be a decent human being.