Brecht, BertoltBertolt Brecht (1898-1956) is acknowledged as one of the great dramatists whose plays, work with the Berliner Ensemble and critical writings have had a considerable influence on the theatre. His landmark plays include The Threepenny Opera, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Silberman, Marc
Marc Silberman is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA. He is the co-editor of the completely revised and updated third edition of Brecht on Theatre and of Brecht on Performance (both 2014), and editor of Brecht on Film & Radio.

Giles, Steve
Steve Giles is Professor Emeritus of German Studies and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has contributed to Brecht on Art and Politics (Methuen Drama, 2003) as well as authoring books on Modern European Drama and Critical Theory.

Kuhn, Tom
Tom Kuhn is Professor of 20th century German Literature at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, UK, and General Editor of Bloomsbury Methuen Drama's Brecht publications.

A wholly revised, re-edited and expanded edition of one of the seminal texts of twentieth century theatre. Featuring new translations, additional texts, illustrations and editorial matter, this is the fullest and clearest account yet of Brecht's thinking on theatre and aesthetics.
A wholly revised, re-edited and expanded edition of one of the seminal texts of twentieth century theatre. Featuring new translations, additional texts, illustrations and editorial matter, this is a fullest and clearest account yet of Brecht's thinking on theatre and aesthetics.

A wholly revised, re-edited and expanded edition of one of the seminal texts of twentieth century theatre. Featuring new translations, additional texts, illustrations and editorial matter, this is the fullest and clearest account yet of Brecht's thinking on theatre and aesthetics.

List of Illustrations
General Introduction and Acknowledgements

Part One - A New Theatre
Introduction to Part One
Frank Wedekind (1918)
Me in the Theatre (1920)
Theatre as Sport (1920)
A Reckoning (1920)
On the Aesthetics of Drama (1920)
On the 'Downfall of the Theatre' (1925)
More Good Sport (1926)
Three Cheers for Shaw (1926)
Prologue to Drums (1926)
Shouldn't We Liquidate Aesthetics? (1927)
Epic Theatre and Its Difficulties (1927)
On New Dramatic Writing (1928)
Latest Stage: Oedipus (1929)
Dialogue about Acting (1929)
On Subject-Matter and Form (1929)
On Rehearsing (c. 1930)
Dialectical Dramatic Writing (1930/31)
Notes on the Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930)
Notes on the Threepenny Opera (1931)
Notes on the Comedy Man Equals Man (1931/38)
Notes on The Mother (1933/38)

Part Two - Exile Years
Introduction to Part Two
OLD VS. NEW THEATRE
Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction (1935)
On Experiments in Epic Theatre (1935)
The German Drama: pre-Hitler (1935)
On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre (1935)
Short List of the Most Frequent, Common and Boring Misconceptions about Epic Theatre (1937)
The Progressiveness of the Stanislavsky System (1937)
On Experimental Theatre (1939)
A Short Private Lecture for My Friend Max Gorelik (1944)
ON CHINESE THEATRE, VERFREMDUNG AND GESTUS
On the Art of Spectatorship (1935)
Maintaining Gestures over Multiple Generations (1935)
Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting (1936)
Three Notes on Verfremdung and the Elder Breughel (1937)
Verfremdung Techniques in the Narrative Pictures of the Elder Brueghel
On the V-effect of the Elder Breughel
V-effects in Some Pictures of the Elder Breughel
On Determining the Zero Point (1936/37)
The Zero Point (1936/37)
Notes on Pointed Heads and Round Heads (1936)
On the Production of the V-effect (1938)
On Gestic Music (1937)
On Rhymeless Verse with Irregular Rhythms (1938)
The Street Scene (1938)
Short Description of a New Technique of Acting that Produces a Verfremdung Effect (1940)
Athletic Training (1940)
On Epic Dramatic Art: Change (1940)
On the Gradual Approach to the Study and Construction of the Figure (1941)
REALISM AND THE PROLETARIAT
The Popular and the Realistic (1938)
Two Essay Fragments on Non-professional (1939)
The Attitude of the Rehearsal Director (in the Inductive Process) (1939)
Notes on the Folk Play (1940)

Part Three - Return to Germany
Introduction to Part Three
SHORT ORGANON
Short Organon for the Theatre (1948)
Appendices to the Short Organon (1954)
THEATRE WORK
Friedrich Wolf - Bert Brecht: Formal Problems Arising from the Theatre's New Content.
A Dialogue (1949)
From a Letter to an Actor (1951)
What Makes an Actor (1951)
Gesture (1951)
Two Notes about Urfaust (1952)
About Our Stagings
The Story
Kurt Palm (1952)
Classical Status as an Intimidating Factor (1954)
ON STANISLAVSKY
Some of the Things That Can Be Learnt from Stanislavsky (1951)
On Stanislavsky (1953)
Stanislavsky Studies [3] (1953)
A Few Thoughts on the Stanislavsky Conference (1953)
DIALECTICAL THEATRE
From Epic to Dialectical Theatre 2 (1954)
Dialectics in the Theatre
Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare's 'Coriolanus' (1953/55)
Relative Haste (1955)
A Detour (The Caucasian Chalk Circle) (1955)
Another Case of Applied Dialectic (1953)
Letter to the Actor Playing Young Hörder in Winter Battle (1954)
Mother Courage Played in Two Ways (1951)
Example of a Scenic Innovation Through the Observation of a Mistake (1953)
Something about Representing Character (1953)
Conversation about Coerced Empathy (1953)
MISCELLANEOUS
Cultural Policy and Academy of Arts (1953)
Socialist Realism in the Theatre (1954)
Can the Present-day World Be Reproduced by Means of Theatre? (1955)
Our London Season (1956)

Select Bibliography
Index

Brecht on Theatre is a seminal work that has remained the classic text for readers and students wanting a rich appreciation of the development of Brecht's thinking on theatre and aesthetics. First published in 1964 and on reading lists ever since, it has now been wholly revised, re-edited and expanded with additional texts, illustrations and editorial material, and new translations. The resulting work is a far fuller and more accurate volume that will provide readers with a clearer and more rewarding understanding of Brecht's work and writings.

This updated third edition features:

Clearer layout and organisation of the text to facilitate study
New translations of many of the Brechtian texts featured
Over 40 new, previously untranslated essays
Essay titles now correspond to the German originals
A revised selection of illustrations

This selection of Bertolt Brecht's critical writing charts the development of his thinking on theatre and aesthetics over four decades. The volume demonstrates how the theories of Epic Theatre and Verfremdung evolved, and contains notes and essays on the staging of The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, Puntila, Galileo and many others of his plays. Also included is 'Short Organon for the Theatre', Brecht's most complete statement of his revolutionary philosophy of the theatre.