Beyond Brecht


Book Description

Peter Brook states unequivocally: "Brecht is the key figure of our time, and all theatre work today at some point starts or returns to his statements and achievement." In Beyond Brecht theatre practitioners, film-makes, and scholars assess the work of those who in their own creative work have absorbed Brecht and sought to move beyond him to create theatre, film, and song for the 1980s. From David Bowie's London Baal production to film in Switzerland, to engaged theatre in Calcutta, to the genius of Fo in Italy, the volume moves us beyond a Brecht fit for the museum, to a Brecht full of life for our turbulent time.




Beyond Documentary Realism


Book Description

Verbatim theatre, a type of performance based on actual words spoken by ''real people'', has been at the heart of a remarkable and unexpected renaissance of the genre in Great Britain since the mid-nineties. The central aim of the book is to critically explore and account for the relationship between contemporary British verbatim theatre and realism whilst questioning the much-debated mediation of the real in theses theatre practices.




To Brecht and Beyond


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To Brecht and Beyond


Book Description

In this book Darko Suvin discerns the shape of an emerging post-Individualist drama which may be to our age what the theatre of Shakespeare and Ibsen was to theirs. Suvin establishes the principles of composition of a crucial group of modern plays. He examines some major attempts and failures to replace Ibsen's "Individualist" theatre with this new "Collectivist" drama. Two particularly important and original contributions to the subject are Suvin's chapters on the Happenings in the USA and on the Paris Commune Theatre Law. The book focuses on the work of Brecht, both because of the importance of his plays and because of what Professor Suvin sees as Brecht's central position today in any cultural critique that refuses to despair.




After Brecht


Book Description

How contemporary British political theater has evolved and expanded from the legacy of Bertolt Brecht




Brecht Plays 8


Book Description

The latest volume in Methuen's Collected Brecht includes two plays previously untranslated into English Volume 8 of Brecht's collected plays contains his last completed plays, from the eight years between his return from America to Europe after the war and his death in 1956. Brecht's ANTIGONE (1948) is a bold adaptation of Holderlin's classic German translation of Sophocles' play. A reflection on resistance and dictatorship in the aftermath of Nazism, it was a radical new experiment in epic theatre. THE DAYS OF THE COMMUNE (1949) is a semi-documentary account of the Paris Commune, and Brecht's most serious and ambitious historical play. TURANDOT is Brecht's version of the classic Chinese story is a satire on the intelligentsia of the Weimar Republic, Nazi bureaucracy, and other targets.




Brecht and Critical Theory


Book Description

Arguing that Brecht’s aesthetic theories are still highly relevant today, and that an appreciation of his theory and theatre is essential to an understanding of modern critical theory, this book examines the influence of Brecht’s aesthetic on the pre-eminent materialist critics of the twentieth century: Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Frederic Jameson, Theodor W. Adorno and Raymond Williams. Re-reading Brecht through the lens of post-structuralism, Sean Carney asserts that there is a Lacanian Brecht and a Derridean Brecht: the result of which is a new Brecht whose vital importance for the present is located in decentred theories of subjectivity. Brecht and Critical Theory maps the many ways in which Brechtian thinking pervades critical thought today, informing the critical tools and stances that make up the contemporary study of aesthetics.




Brecht Sourcebook


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Brecht and Company


Book Description

The result of twenty-five years of research on three continents, Brecht and Company is a revolutionary portrait of one of the world's greatest theater artists -- and the people upon whom he built his reputation. A noted Brecht scholar, John Fuegi traces the evolution of Brecht's parasitic relationships and aggressive ambition through close analysis of diaries, letters, and drafts of the literary works, revealing a man who was personally dazzling, a genius at assembling and directing the plays created in his workshop, but ultimately lacking in literary stamina, for which he depended on his lovers. A landmark study about the life and times of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century theater, Brecht and Co. will forever change our understanding of Brecht and his oeuvre. "[An] enormous, fascinating biography." -- The New Yorker "One of the most important critical studies of the century." -- New York Magazine




Questions (After Brecht)


Book Description

Karen Knorr photographed the building site of the disused Parisian Art-Deco Department store, La Samaritaine, in the summers of 2017 and 2018. In this new book, the resulting photographs, transformed with solarisation and infused with playful fantasy and surrealism are accompanied by lines from Brecht?s poem: 'Questions from a Worker Who Reads' (1935).