To aid the audiences’ objective assessment of onstage action, Brecht developed a technique of alienation also known as the a-effect or distancing technique involving the process of taking human social incidents to be portrayed and labelling them as something calling for an explanation. The intention behind this effect is allowing the audience to criticise constructively from an objective viewpoint. Brecht’s aim in alienating an incident or character is to take away from that incident or character what makes it obvious, familiar and understandable and surround it with curiosity. Due to the playwrights influencing of the audience to be detached and think for themselves, audiences are drawn away from the sentimentality of the play and forced to make conscious decisions relating to issues with socially practical significance dealt with in the play. The idea that one should suspend disbelief when watching a performance was shattered by Brecht’s revolutionary theories – one should be continually, intensively aware that what one is watching is a theatrical event. (www)

Brecht believed that "To think, or write, or produce a play also means to transform society, to transform the state, to subject ideologies to close scrutiny." (Time, 2 March. 1998, John Willet) A reoccurring theme of Brechts plays is the transformation of the human being by outside forces. Brecht wanted people to react upon seeing injustice or suffering on stage, leaving the theatre determined to do something about what they had seen. (www.) Thematic similarities can be drawn between Brecht and Athol Fugard and their repeated use of societies outcasts as a means to portray the condition of all people. Fugards The Island ends with Winston’s open-ended monologue in the character of Antigone. No physical presence of inmates leads to the audience in the theatre ‘becoming’ the inmates to whom Winston delivers his speech; creating a play-within-a-play situation. This disturbing ending allows audiences to think about the existence of man and the injustices and prejudices of the time. Fugard aim with this was making audiences aware of degradation and dehumanising of people and the ultimate t

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