Between the First and Second World Wars, many thousands of working-class and avant-garde theatre-makers created and performed in agitprop – a topical, accessible, and highly physical genre that aims to inform and persuade audiences. Although agitprop has Russian revolutionary origins, it proved so flexible and transmissible that well-known troupes like Moscow’s Blue Blouse and Berlin’s Red Megaphone stimulated waves of performances, adaptations, and original work in other cities and countries, including the UK, US, Japan, and Mexico. Epic theatre, as developed by Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, and their co-workers during the interwar and early post-war years, shared agitprop’s pedagogical priorities and many of its elements, including loose, episodic structures and anti-mimetic acting styles. This essay follows Piscator and Brecht themselves by emphasising the formal and historical connections between agitprop and epic theatre, refusing to consign the former to the category of juvenilia.