Brecht and Epic Theatre

If Stanislavski wanted audiences to lose themselves in a believable inner world, the German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht wanted the opposite. Working through the turbulent decades between the world wars, Brecht developed epic theatre, a set of practices designed to keep spectators thinking critically rather than surrendering emotionally. His ideas transformed political theatre and remain a major alternative to realism.

Theatre for a scientific age

Brecht, a committed Marxist, believed that society could be changed and that theatre should help audiences see it as changeable. Realism, he argued, encouraged passive identification: viewers wept for a suffering hero but left the theatre with their view of the world intact. Brecht wanted a "theatre for a scientific age" in which audien