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Brecht, Brexit, and Beyond: An Interview with Simon Stephens
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- By Anja Hartl
- Edited by Markus Wessendorf, University of Hawaii, Manoa
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- Book:
- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 47
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 22 November 2022, pp 6-21
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Summary
Simon Stephens is one of the most prolific playwrights in twenty-firstcentury British theater; his exuberant creative imagination is reflected in his idiosyncratic and daringly experimental approach to theater-making that has yielded highly innovative and stylistically eclectic plays which have set Stephens apart from the tradition of new writing in British theater. One of the most outstanding characteristics of his theater practice is the extent to which Stephens interrogates conventions by crossing aesthetic, dramaturgical, and cultural borders. For Stephens, taking a (geographical) distance, exploring different cultures, and drawing on them as a source of inspiration for his own work is a fundamental prerequisite not only for adopting a fresh perspective on but also for better getting to know and establishing a more intimate relationship with one's “home”—and oneself: “When we travel abroad we see our home with a clarity that we may never have been offered before.”
These border-crossings have informed his work as a playwright on multiple levels, most notably regarding the composition, development, and production of his plays. Throughout his career, Stephens has closely collaborated with European directors, for example Ivo van Hove, who has directed Stephens's Song from Far Away (2015), and Sebastian Nübling, under whose direction several of his plays premiered in Germany; indeed, many of his works have been popular outside Britain, especially on the German-speaking stage. Accordingly, for Stephens, “theater practice is not simply about staging the imagination of a playwright but a multi-authored process of collaboration, conflict, intervention and exploration.” His work as a writer is thus based on a dynamic understanding of the relationships between playwright, director, actors, and audiences. Emphasizing this spirit of interaction, he prefers to describe himself as a playwright rather than an author because the former term “is charged with connotations of life as a theater worker.” As he further explains below, notions of authority and authorial control over his texts are much less interesting to Stephens than collaboration as a source of creative inspiration.
It is in this collaborative and interactive vein that adaptation has played a defining and increasingly important role in Stephens's theater practice. His projects have ranged from turning novels into dramatic texts—most famously Stephens's adaptation of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012)—to writing new translations of plays by Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and Bertolt Brecht.
Recycling Brecht in Britain: David Greig’s The Events as Post-Brechtian Lehrstück
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- By Anja Hartl
- Edited by Tom Kuhn, David Barnett, Theodore F. Rippey
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- Book:
- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 42
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 March 2018, pp 153-170
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Summary
2016 marks not only the sixtieth anniversary of Bertolt Brecht's death, but also the sixtieth anniversary of the Berliner Ensemble's first visit to London, which had a catalytic effect on the development of political drama in Britain throughout the twentieth century. After early encounters with Brechtian theater practice from the 1930s onward, it is the year 1956 that marks “a clear starting point for the story of Brecht's reception and influence in Britain.” The Berliner Ensemble's productions, along with Brecht's writings, which were available in English from the mid-1960s onward, considerably influenced British playwrights and theater makers alike, “shak[ing]” British theater “out of [its] rooted complacency” and contributing to the creation of a vibrant political theater scene in Britain. Indeed, the postwar situation in Britain provided fertile ground for Brecht's ideas and generations of playwrights, among them John Arden, Edward Bond, and Caryl Churchill, have taken on his aesthetic and theoretical legacy to spur the development of leftist political theater. Significantly, Brecht's approach to theater has remained a major shaping force in British playwriting and has played a decisive part in “a social and political turn in theatre” that has revitalized contemporary drama at the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet, while Brecht has continued to represent a vital source of inspiration for British dramatists, fundamental interrogations into the forms and functions of political art in the wake of recent political and philosophical developments, culminating in postmodernist ideological relativism, the end of communism, and the increasingly all-encompassing power of globalization, have challenged traditional notions of political theater in general and of Brechtian Epic Theater in particular.
With an insistence on the continued relevance of Brecht's dialectical model of theater, this essay seeks to investigate the challenges of recycling Brecht for the contemporary British stage and to examine how, with what aims, and with what consequences playwrights in Britain have productively reinterpreted and developed Brecht's method since the 1990s. Critically engaging with Brecht's legacy in the light of the philosophical, political, and social transformations of the last decades, playwrights turn to the experiential as a way of both taking on Brecht's ideas and adapting them to the context of the twenty-first century.