For about thirty years in the middle of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht dominated Western theater by virtue of their difference. Beckett represented a theater of the absurd and Brecht a theater of political commitment, each defining the other by their incompatibilities. Only their successors began to question the dichotomies and to draw on both their legacies. This volume looks back at the common ground of these two dramatists: their modernism and its legacy, their innovations in new media, the ways they directed their own work, and the shape of their thinking and writing. This territory is explored from the various perspectives of directors, dramaturgs, actors, and theorists in these contributions from a 2001 symposium at the University of Dublin. Distributed for the International Brecht Society In English and German

Aboard a long-range research vessel, in the vast reaches of the South Pacific, the cast and crew of the reality show Sealife believe they have found a ratings bonanza. For a director dying for drama, a distress call from Henders Island—a mere blip on any radar—might be just the ticket. Until the first scientist sets foot on Henders—and the ultimate test of survival begins. For when they reach the island’s shores, the scientists are utterly unprepared for what they find—creatures unlike any ever recorded in natural history. This is not a lost world frozen in time; this is Earth as it might have looked after evolving on a separate path for half a billion years—a fragment of a lost continent, with an ecosystem that could topple ours like a house of cards.

A ruthless Russian tycoon lures biologists Nell and Geoffrey to his underground metropolis, where they are confronted by a vicious menagerie of biological horrors that are rising up to consume the world.