Chapter 16 - Political Theatre in France (1954–2020)

Summary

Olivier Neveux focuses on overtly political, often militant performance. Using as an impetus, the German director, playwright and theoretician Bertolt Brecht’s theories of epic theatre and Marxist dialectics, which have been by turns foundational and marginal in France, Neveux traces the relationship between theatre and politics over a period of more than half a century. Brecht and Brechtianism have offered opportunities to politicize theatre in France. However, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the radical left lost its influence in the social field, and neoliberalism appeared to have won out. While Brecht’s star might seem to have waned, examining the ways in which political theatre has transformed, evolved and modified in relation to, or in opposition to his ideas, affords the possibility, as Neveux suggests, to appreciate how protest performance might evolve in the future.