From Epic to Dialectical Theatre

Not long before his death in 1956, Brecht expressed dissatisfaction with the terminology ‘epic theatre’ that had long described his dramaturgical aesthetic and advocated a shift to what he termed ‘dialectical theatre’ (1964, 281–2). Brecht’s use of the term dialectics invokes a long philosophical history that can be traced to the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers such as Heraclitus, through to German idealists such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and nineteenth-century materialist philosophers like Karl Marx. The influence of historical materialist thought and dialectics on Brecht’s theory for the theatre has long been acknowledged by Brechtian scholars including, most notably, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Peter Brooker, Antony Tatlow, David Barnett and Sean Carney. This book surveys this scholarship and builds upon it by offering a detailed reading of Brechtian dialectics in a late capitalist or post-Marxist context.