Florian Malzacher, ed. Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today. Performing Urgency Series #1. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2015. 196 pages.

Summary

The title of Florian Malzacher's engaging volume on contemporary incarnations of political theater, Not Just a Mirror, cites an apocryphal sentence: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it” (11). This sentence certainly has a nice ring of proverbial wisdom to it and it is frequently quoted as having been coined by Brecht. Yet the spirit of this quotation is perhaps less Brechtian than those who like to cite it think, for the opposition of “mirror” and “hammer” represents an all too easy dichotomy of art as reflection (reminiscent of a “Widerspiegelungstheorie” often associated with Georg Lukács, Brecht's antipode in the 1938 debate over realism and formalism) and art as an instrument of political practice. In contradistinction to such a dichotomy, Brecht's dialectical theater foregrounds the problem of representation within the act of representation, and hence serves as both critique and renewal of theatrical representation. Arguably, even a piece of activist theater, such as Brecht's Lehrstück Die Mutter, in which political agitation (i.e., political content) wins out over dramatic conflict (i.e., aesthetic form), still serves as an aesthetic mirror in which the proletarian audience can see its own hopes and struggles reflected.

In the essay that introduces and frames the volume, Malzacher argues that political theater is now only possible when it discards the forms of political theater predominant in the 1970s and 1980s, of which the Brechtian theater served as the most widely acknowledged paradigm. In the spirit of moving away from this older model, Malzacher's essay's title structurally reiterates the rhetorical negation of Not Just a Mirror: “No organum to follow.” This sounds like a political slogan and alludes, of course, to Brecht's Short Organon for the Theater. Malzacher's negation of Brecht is both descriptive and prescriptive. It is descriptive, because it states what Malzacher's volume documents as a predominant trend: “a theatre that not only focuses on pressing political issues, but also becomes a political space—a public sphere—in itself” (20). It is prescriptive, because Malzacher believes that the very logic of representation has proved to be politically and aesthetically discredited. All theater that remains within the traditional aesthetic boundary of semblance and play ultimately affirms the unjust social relations it seeks to critically reveal.