Brecht’s Legacy and Influence

Interview with Tom Kuhn: Part 8

Tom Kuhn is Professor of Twentieth-Century German Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College. His main research interests are in political literature in the 20th century. He has worked particularly on Bertolt Brecht, and is the series editor of the main English-language edition of Brecht’s works.

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Influence
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing

PC: What or who has Brecht influenced?

TK: Is it in the making of theatre or in the writing of plays that we’re looking for the influence or is it specifically in politics? I would say politically he has had the least influence. But in the making and writing of theatre he has had a huge influence. Okay, the making of theatre perhaps we should leave to one side as we have talked a bit about that already. And we shouldn’t just be British in this, we should look more widely. In Germany, a generation of writers like Dürrenmatt, already in the 1950s and 60s, but then later figures like Heiner Müller above all, are obviously very explicitly influenced by Brecht. They tried to take Brecht a stage further, with greater or lesser success. I mean I am not a great fan of Dürrenmatt, I think of his work as sort of a sub-Brecht rather than a next stage. Then in Britain the wave of influence comes a lot later, but you could say the whole generation of Howard Brenton, David Hare and David Edgar, people like that, are influenced by Brecht’s plays and to a certain extent by the idea of a political theatre of that nature. Hare said that he didn’t like Brecht but there are nonetheless similarities. And all of them have done translations of Brecht’s plays or adaptations at sometime or another. In the next generation, Tony Kushner in the United States says that he always goes back to Brecht and thinks of Brecht as a huge influence. Mark Ravenhill who wrote Shopping and Fucking also thinks of Brecht as a sort of father figure of his own theatre. You can also look beyond Britain, Germany and the US: Brecht’s influence on the writing of drama and the making of theatre is huge in India and in South America and in parts of East Asia. To a certain extent his politics are more readily accessible and his models of society make more sense in a developing economy than they do in a very advanced capitalist economy. You can see the contradictions and the conflicts more directly in developing economies, so he is popular there.

PC: Augusto Boal?

TK: Yeah Boal is another very important example.

PC: Boal is interesting as a kind of collision with naturalism as invisible theatre is almost uber-naturalism: spectactors become performers in reality. He represents a cross over.

TK: Brecht was also already interested in this kind of ‘spectactor’ with the Lehrstück experiments around 1930. In The Decision or The Measures Taken the chorus was all 400 members of the audience who were coached in the songs before the play started, so they were spectactors.

PC: That reminds me of some verbatim theatre at the moment – Little Revolution by Alecky Blythe. It is a response to the London riots. They had members of the community caught in the events that were performing in a play where all the words were verbatim from the community.

TK: Brecht’s theatre is very experimental and he takes experiments in different directions. All the plays are extraordinarily different in their structure, their dramaturgy, their whole texture and feel, one rich in its language the other deliberately pared down and impoverished in its language. He is always trying different things and in a way you could look for a legacy as vague as: intelligent socially engaged experiment; anyone who is engaged in intelligent socially experimental theatre is carrying Brecht forward in some way or another. And of course there are lots of different versions of that, and if he were still around he would be practicing lots of different versions of that too.

PC: I know you are more textual scholar but do you ever get theatre makers to respond to your research?

TK: I have very little experience of working in the theatre at all. The only person I have really worked with is Di Trevis. I have known her for years. She has been very amenable to trying things out for me. The most recent thing that we have done was realise a production of a play which Brecht himself never finished, which is just a load of fragments, but really a load of fragments, a pile of mess in the archive, hardly any worked out scenes, it is not an unfinished play, you can’t even see what the plot was supposed to be. I tried to make it into a play and she tried to make it into play in the theatre, and that is a very recent experience. It hugely informed the way I will write about that play – it is called Fatzer by the way – in future; well I’ll be doing an English edition of it for a start, which will be informed by the script that we arrived at. I’ll also be writing about it as a project that failed and why it failed and what we should draw from its failure. Because lots of sort of more sophisticated literary critics write about it very much as a post-modern fragment, as if Brecht were deliberately sitting down to write a fragment, whereas I think the practical work in the theatre brought out absolutely clearly that in 1926, when he started working on it, he sat down to write a play but it got derailed and fell apart.

PC: Forced Entertainment are a company working currently that explore the fragmentary nature of storytelling and society. Their work is sometimes deliberately unfinished and actively presents failure. But you don’t think that Brecht himself had such post-modern intentions with the play you have worked on?

TK: It is clear that Brecht was always aiming for something much more finished. Whatever we may think about Brechtian form, although it is different from play to play, once he began he mostly had a pretty strong sense of the direction in which something was going to develop. He was very dependent on the big speech really. His dialogue is not very fragmented at all, in comparison with some modern playwrights, certainly in comparison with Tony Kushner – he can write amazing scenes in which nobody ever finishes a sentence – Brecht never did that – his is much more a literary enterprise tied to the traditions of the time.

Summary

  • Politically Brecht has had the least influence. But in the making and writing of theatre he has had a huge influence.
  • You can see the contradictions and the conflicts more directly in developing economies, so Brecht is popular there.
  • A kind of ‘spectactor’ found in Augusto Boal’s work can be found in Brecht’s Lehrstück experiments around 1930.
  • Anyone who is engaged in intelligent socially experimental theatre is carrying Brecht forward in some way or another.
  • It is clear that Brecht was always aiming for something much more finished rather than exploring what leaving something unfinished means.
  • Brecht was very dependent on the big speech. He takes a literary approach tied to the traditions of the time.

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