Recycling Brecht in Britain: David Greig’s The Events as Post-Brechtian Lehrstück

Summary

2016 marks not only the sixtieth anniversary of Bertolt Brecht's death, but also the sixtieth anniversary of the Berliner Ensemble's first visit to London, which had a catalytic effect on the development of political drama in Britain throughout the twentieth century. After early encounters with Brechtian theater practice from the 1930s onward, it is the year 1956 that marks “a clear starting point for the story of Brecht's reception and influence in Britain.” The Berliner Ensemble's productions, along with Brecht's writings, which were available in English from the mid-1960s onward, considerably influenced British playwrights and theater makers alike, “shak[ing]” British theater “out of [its] rooted complacency” and contributing to the creation of a vibrant political theater scene in Britain. Indeed, the postwar situation in Britain provided fertile ground for Brecht's ideas and generations of playwrights, among them John Arden, Edward Bond, and Caryl Churchill, have taken on his aesthetic and theoretical legacy to spur the development of leftist political theater. Significantly, Brecht's approach to theater has remained a major shaping force in British playwriting and has played a decisive part in “a social and political turn in theatre” that has revitalized contemporary drama at the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet, while Brecht has continued to represent a vital source of inspiration for British dramatists, fundamental interrogations into the forms and functions of political art in the wake of recent political and philosophical developments, culminating in postmodernist ideological relativism, the end of communism, and the increasingly all-encompassing power of globalization, have challenged traditional notions of political theater in general and of Brechtian Epic Theater in particular.

With an insistence on the continued relevance of Brecht's dialectical model of theater, this essay seeks to investigate the challenges of recycling Brecht for the contemporary British stage and to examine how, with what aims, and with what consequences playwrights in Britain have productively reinterpreted and developed Brecht's method since the 1990s. Critically engaging with Brecht's legacy in the light of the philosophical, political, and social transformations of the last decades, playwrights turn to the experiential as a way of both taking on Brecht's ideas and adapting them to the context of the twenty-first century.