Against Interpretation and Other Essays

by Susan Sontag

Admittedly Brecht was a sly, ambivalent guardian of Communist “morality.” But the secret of his plays is to be sought in his idea of the theater as a moralizing instrument. Hence his use of stage techniques borrowed from the non-naturalistic theater of China and Japan, and his famous theory of stage production and acting—the Alienation Effect—which aims to enforce a detached, intellectual attitude upon the audience. (The Alienation Effect seems to be mainly a method of writing plays and of staging them, non-naturalistically; its effect as a method of acting, from what I have seen of the Berliner Ensemble, is mainly to moderate, to tone down, the naturalistic style of acting—not fundamentally to contradict it.) By assimilating Brecht to the metadramatists, with whom he surely shares something, Abel obscures the difference between Brecht’s didacticism and the studied neutrality—the mutual cancellation of all values—which is represented by the true metadramatists.