Brecht and Stanislavki- There early lives and first works.

Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898 in pre world war 1 Germany, he was a sickly child and started writing poetry at a very young age. While at school he met Caspar Neher who became a good friend and in later life he designed visual iconography that would uniquely identify the epic theatre. The war broke out when he was 16, to avoid being drafted for the front lines he enrolled as a medical student at Munich University. While attending he spent most of his time going to drama classes and continuing to write poetry. After the war he watched the slow rise of the Third Reich growing up in this time must have been difficult for Brecht due to inflammation the cost of food skyrocketed and most of the population would have been starving. As the Nazi party rose to power Brecht continued to write poetry and plays with his first play ‘BAAL’ being published and performed in 1923, it celebrated life and sexuality, it has later been produced many times over the most recognizable by the BBC in 1982 with David Bowie.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2016/jun/09/david-bowie-baal-alan-clarke-bertolt-brecht-bbc-video
-A short clip of the BBC adaptation.

However, as the Third Reich which continued and the prosecution the Jewish population many of Brecht's plays and poems were banned, he also faced prosecution so he fled to America for the duration of World war 2 where he arguably wrote some of his best work.

.Mother courage and her children

.Man Equals Man

.The threepenny opera

.The life of Galileo

most theatres at the time was made to distract and purely entertain the audience, Brecht brought a new ideology to how theatre should be made. Brecht believed that theatre should educate and inform the audience, to make them want to change their society. He wanted the actors of his shows not to ‘become’ the character but to display the character. He went against the more traditional naturalism acting of the time.

After the was he returned to East Germany and created the Berliner Ensemble with his wife Helene Weigel in 1949. They originally worked at the Wolfgang Langhoff Deutsches Theatre, The Berliner Ensemble achieved successful theater through long and meticulous rehearsals, often spanning several months. Each production was documented with a Modellbuch or preview album containing 600 to 800 action photographs. After Brecht's death in 1956, his wife continued to company the company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Ensemble
https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/bertolt-brecht-834.php

Konstantin Stanislavski was born in 1863 in Moscow in a town called Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev from a wealthy family who were also heavily involved in theatre.  His grandmother was French actress and his farter even made a stage on the family estate. He first started acting at the age of 14 with different acting groups while also working in the family manufacturing business. He married Maria Perevozchikova a teacher, later she would join her husband in their pursuit of acting. In 1888 Stanislavski co-founded society of art and literature where he performed and directed numerous productions for almost a decade. After 1897 he and Vladimir Danchenko opened the Moscow Art Theatre where their company started in 1888 with the first production ‘The Seagull’. Over the next 10 years, they grew to be renowned with their productions.

.The Petty Bourgeois,

.An Enemy of the People

.The Blue Bird

.The Cherry Orchard

Stanislavski co-directed these performances with Danchenko, in 1910 he traveled to Italy where he studied new plays of Eleanora Duse and Tommaso Salvini, this would later inspire his own teaching when he opened the first studio in 1912 for training young actors. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Stanislavski faced some criticism for not producing communist works, yet he was able to maintain his company's unique perspective and not contend with an imposed artistic vision. During a performance to commemorate the Moscow Art Theatre 30th anniversary, Stanislavski suffered a heart attack.

Stanislavski spent his later years focusing on his writing, directing and teaching. He died on August 7, 1938, in the city of his birth.

Stanislavski method of acting was to bring a meaningful and deep discipline, he believed unlike Brecht that the actors should inhabit authentic and naturalistic emotion while on stage, they’d use their own experiences to connect to their character. He was also developed new techniques to

Encourage actors to explore depth and meaning and why their characters do what they do. Stanislavski inspired people like Lee Strasberg who uses emotional memories to create their characters. (refer back to previous pages regarding animal farm for more information about Stanislavski)