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defamiliarization effect - was achieved in different ways: viewers could be addressed directly
by actors, the third person could be used in dialogue, and settings could be stylized to remind
viewers of the constructed nature of theatre, so that their attention would repeatedly shift
from the fictional world towards more critical analyses of what was occurring on stage.
Nevertheless, Brecht noted how, in Piscator's production of The Good Soldier
Schweik, 'the spectator's empathy was not entirely rejected. The audience identifies itself
with the actor as being an observer and accordingly develops his attitude of observing or
looking on' (Willett, 1992: 91-93). Emotions in general were not discarded from Brecht's
work, and music sometimes introduced a controlled form of affect that might lead reflection
on the viewer's part. In the essay On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre Brecht asserts that
music 'made possible [...] "poetic theatre" ', emphasizing how, in The Threepenny Opera,
'the musical items, which had the immediacy of a ballad, were of a reflective and moralizing
nature', the criminal characters showing 'sometimes through the music itself, that their
sensations, feelings and prejudices were the same as those of the average citizen' (Willett,
1992: 84-85). Brecht warned against the mistake of supposing that epic theatre was bereft of
emotions; he asserted that emotions can be clarified during the course of performances, as
long as the elicited emotions are not the sort that carry spectators away (Willett, 1992: 88).
Having always been suspicious of theatrical productions based on audiences passively
empathizing with a character's emotions, an aversion that was heightened by the hypnotic
forms of theatre prevalent during Nazism, towards the end of his career, in the appendices to
the 'Short Organum' (1954), Brecht showed an awareness of the way his theatre had thrived
on interplay between the eliciting of an empathic understanding of a character s socio-
economic circumstances and his work's more didactic elements (Mumford, 2009: 63). In the
appendices, he reflects on many elements of epic theatre, noting that it had been 'too
inflexibly opposed to the concept of the dramatic', and that its proponents had always taken it
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