Verbatim theatre, a type of performance based on actual words spoken by ''real people'', has been at the heart of a remarkable and unexpected renaissance of the genre in Great Britain since the mid-nineties. The central aim of the book is to critically explore and account for the relationship between contemporary British verbatim theatre and realism whilst questioning the much-debated mediation of the real in theses theatre practices.

How contemporary British political theater has evolved and expanded from the legacy of Bertolt Brecht

Arguing that Brecht’s aesthetic theories are still highly relevant today, and that an appreciation of his theory and theatre is essential to an understanding of modern critical theory, this book examines the influence of Brecht’s aesthetic on the pre-eminent materialist critics of the twentieth century: Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Frederic Jameson, Theodor W. Adorno and Raymond Williams. Re-reading Brecht through the lens of post-structuralism, Sean Carney asserts that there is a Lacanian Brecht and a Derridean Brecht: the result of which is a new Brecht whose vital importance for the present is located in decentred theories of subjectivity. Brecht and Critical Theory maps the many ways in which Brechtian thinking pervades critical thought today, informing the critical tools and stances that make up the contemporary study of aesthetics.

This updated edition properly retains much that was in the original Companion, but also introduces new voices and themes. It brings together the contrasting views of major critics and active practitioners and contains new essays on Brecht's early experience of cabaret, his significance in the development of film theory and his unique approach to dramaturgy. A detailed calendar of Brecht's life and work and a selective bibliography of English criticism complete this thorough overview of a writer who constantly aimed to provoke. Book jacket.

The latest volume in Methuen's Collected Brecht includes two plays previously untranslated into English Volume 8 of Brecht's collected plays contains his last completed plays, from the eight years between his return from America to Europe after the war and his death in 1956. Brecht's ANTIGONE (1948) is a bold adaptation of Holderlin's classic German translation of Sophocles' play. A reflection on resistance and dictatorship in the aftermath of Nazism, it was a radical new experiment in epic theatre. THE DAYS OF THE COMMUNE (1949) is a semi-documentary account of the Paris Commune, and Brecht's most serious and ambitious historical play. TURANDOT is Brecht's version of the classic Chinese story is a satire on the intelligentsia of the Weimar Republic, Nazi bureaucracy, and other targets.

Fredric Jameson argues that Brecht's method was a multi-layered process of reflection and self-reflection, reference and self-reference, which allows individuals to situate themselves historically and think for themselves.

"At me too someone is looking... " —Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot In a venturesome study of corporeality and perception in contemporary drama, Stanton B. Garner, Jr., turns this awareness of the spectator's gaze back upon itself. His book takes up two of drama's most essential and elusive elements: spatiality, through which plays establish fields of visual and environmental relationship; and the human body, through which these fields are articulated. Within the spatial terms of theater, this book puts the body and its perceptual worlds back into performance theory. Garner's approach is phenomenological, emphasizing perception and experience in the theatrical environment. His discussion of the work of playwrights after 1950-including Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Peter Weiss, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Edward Bond, Maria Irene Fornes, Caryl Churchill, and Ntozake Shange—explores the body's modes of presence in contemporary drama. Drawing on work in areas as diverse as scenographic theory, medical phenomenology, contemporary linguistics, and feminist theories of the body, Garner addresses topics such as theatrical image, stage objects, dramatic language, the suffering body, and the staging of gender, all with a view toward developing a phenomenology of mise en scene.

This is the first volume in any language that collects Hannah Arendt's remarkable series of essays and notes on literary figures and cultural questions.