Examining the ways in which contemporary Western theatre protests against the ‘War on Terror’, this book analyses six twenty-first century plays that respond to the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. The plays are written by some of the most significant writers of this century and the last including Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Hélène Cixous and Tony Kushner. Anti-war Theatre After Brecht grapples with the problem of how to make theatre that protests the policies of democratically elected Western governments in a post-Marxist era. It shows how the Internet has become a key tool for disseminating anti-war play texts and how online social media forums are changing traditional dramatic aesthetics and broadening opportunities for spectator access, engagement and interaction with a work and the political alternatives it puts forward.

Mother Courage and Her Children is widely regarded as Brecht's best work, a theatrical landmark and one of the most powerful anti-war plays in history. This translation by Michael Hofmann was published to coincide with the UK tour by English Touring Theatre in 2006. In this chronicle of the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century, Mother Courage follows the armies back and forth across Europe, selling provisions and liquor from her canteen wagon. As the action of the play progresses between the years 1624 and 1646 she loses her children to the war but remains indomitable, refusing to part with her livelihood - the wagon. The play is one of the most celebrated examples of Epic Theatre and of Brecht's use of alienation effect to focus attention on the issues of the play above the individual characters. It remains regarded as one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century and one of the great anti-war plays of all time. The Berlin production of 1949, with Helene Weigel as Mother Courage, marked the foundation of the Berliner Ensemble. Translated by the celebrated, German-born translator Michael Hofmann who has won multiple awards for his translation of works from German into English, the stage production was acclaimed for his 'gutsy,colloquial translation' (The Stage).

Full Length, Drama w/music / 18m, 5f, extras /Int./5 Exts. This German play was written in 1939 and was first produced in Zurich in 1941. In America, it was published in English right away (1941, by New Directions) but did not reach Broadway till 1963 - in a memorable production directed by Jerome Robbins and starring Anne Bancroft. It had, of course, by that time been produced to much acclaim all over the world. When Bertolt Brecht directed the play in Munich (1950), Eric Bentley, Assistant Director, at his bidding started to translate the play into English. He was eventually to make several different English versions of it. The most interesting of these is published here. It was a collaboration with the eminent French composer Darius Milhaud. Together they made this remarkable contribution to musical theatre.

This volume surveys and assesses the contributions of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht to theatre-making, which richly exemplify the range of ways that directors address dramatic material, theatrical space and their audiences. Their directorial work marks an unmistakeable interest in developing the political potential of theatre in the early 20th century, although each director offered more to their actors, collaborators and spectators than simply the staging of politics and the political.

One of Bertolt Brecht's best-loved and most performed plays, The Threepenny Opera was first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble). Based on the eighteenth-century The Beggar's Opera by John Gay, the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world. This new edition is published here in John Willett and Ralph Manhein's classic translation with commentary and notes by Anja Hartl.

This book makes the case for Bertolt Brecht’s continued importance at a time when events of the 21st century cry out for a studied means of producing theatre for social change. Here is a unique step-by-step process for realizing Brecht’s ways of working onstage using the 2015 Texas Tech University production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as a model for exploration. Particular Brecht concepts—the epic, Verfremdung, the Fabel, gestus, historicization, literarization, the “Not...but,” Arrangement, and the Separation of the Elements—are explained and applied to scenes and plays. Brecht’s complicated relationship with Konstantin Stanislavsky is also explored in relation to their separate views on acting. For theatrical practitioners and educators, this volume is a record of pedagogical engagement, an empirical study of Brecht’s work in performance at a higher institution of learning using graduate and undergraduate students.

Making a compelling argument for the continuing relevance of Brechtian film theory and cinema, this book offers new research and analysis of Brecht the film and media theorist, placing his scattered writings on the subject within the lively film theory debates that took place in Europe between the 1920sÃǾ2ƠÂ01960s.