Polly peachum biography of martin

BERTOLT BRECHT

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

PLOT SUMMARY

CHARACTERS

THEMES

STYLE

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

CRITICISM

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FURTHER READING

Bertolt Brecht’s play The Threepenny Opera was his most financially successful play and the work with which he is most closely identified.

The play is an early example of his “epic theater,” consisting of theatrical innovations designed to awaken audiences to social responsibility. Epic theater uses “alienating” devices, such as placards, asides to the audience, projected images, discordant music and lighting, and disconnected episodes to frustrate the viewer’s expectations for simple entertainment.

This “theater of illusions” (as anti-realists such as Brecht termed it) allowed the audience to comfortably and passively view a production without being changed by it. It was Brecht’s intention to use drama to invoke social change, to shake his audiences out of their complacency and expect more from the theater t