Burying Brecht?

I recently came across a great way of sharing audio streams,  soundcloud.com. A lot of theatres and practitioners are using it as a way of sharing panel discussions. I have set up a sister site to this one so I can add to the diversity of what I post here. I won’t always duplicate posts or what I subscribe to on soundcloud so check it out occasionally to see what I have re-posted. You can find Theatre Room Asia on soundcloud here.

I am going to share a great one today, which is a panel discussion of German and English theatre practitioners on the relevance of Bertolt Brecht and Brechtian theatre in the modern theatrical landscape.

brecht

To coincide with our production of A Life of Galileo, and in collaboration with the Goethe Institute in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) hosted a ‘Brecht Meeting’ of British and German theatre makers in March 2013.
Chaired by Mark Ravenhill (RSC playwright in residence and writer of our new English version of A Life of Galileo), we explored the relevance (if any) that Brecht has for us as contemporary theatre makers.

Has Brecht now become a familiar ‘classic’, who can be produced in the same way that we might play Shakespeare or Schiller?

Does he still present challenges that allow us to ask important questions in the making of new theatre?

Should we bury his work and move on as though he never happened?

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And if would like to, you hear an interview with the director of A Life of Galileo, Roxana Silbert, with journalist Paul Allen.

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