"he [Brecht called "fabel" was the plot of the play told as a sequence of interactions, describing each event in the dialectic fashion developed by Hegel, Marx and, in Brecht’s last years, also by Mao. This may sound quite theoretical, but in Brecht’s practice the "fabel" was something utterly concrete and practical. Acting, music, the visual elements of the staging, in short, everything an audience perceived, had to contribute to the storytelling and make it lucid, convincing, entertaining and ‘elegant’--as Brecht liked to put it. One result was that the Ensemble’s productions were quite well understood by international audiences who could not follow the German text. Brecht insisted that the configuration and movement of actors and objects on stage should clearly ‘tell the "fabel"’. If they were to watch a play through a glass wall blocking all sound, the audience should still be able to follow the essential story. He also insisted that each of the performance elements: acting, design, music and so forth, should remain a recognisable separate entity while it contributed to the "fabel"’s presentation. Brecht liked to speak of a 'storytelling arrangement', which meant the specific blocking of actors and all props employed in a scene. He regarded this arrangement as the most important means to achieve a clear presentation of the "fabel", and the term 'scenic writing' may best convey what he was aiming for. [. . .] The thorough and extremely detailed preparation included countless discussions in which a text was dissected to determine which "fabel" it might yield."