BRE - WILLET, John - The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht - (Paperback)

Book still in a good condition - Previous ownership inside.  >>>   Bertolt Brecht (born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht) was a German poet, playwright, and theater director. A seminal theater practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble the post-war theater company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene Weigel with its internationally acclaimed productions.   -   From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theater', synthesized and extended the experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to explore the theater as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama (which constitutes that medium's rendering of 'autonomization' or the 'non-organic work of art 'related in kind to the strategy of divergent chapters in Joyce's novel Ulysses, to Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and to Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts). In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to 're-function' the apparatus of theatrical production to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era particularly over the 'high art/popular culture' dichotomy vying with the likes of Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin. Brechtian theater articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger insists that he is "the most important materialist writer of our time."          * Biography ??? * Drama *