Brecht’s Gale

Abstract

What can Marxist dialectics tell us about theatrical innovation? ‘Innovation’ saturates the world of contemporary performance, even though what the term actually means is anything but self-evident. This essay contrasts two ways scholars theorise theatrical innovation, one which owes to the work of the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the other to Bertolt Brecht. Whereas Schumpeter thought of innovation in terms of a “gale of creative destruction” that renovates capitalist society and its institutions, Brecht’s theory of innovation–what I call “Brecht’s gale”–described the measures artists must take to transform theatre into a weapon of anti-capitalist struggle.

For theatre scholars and artists, distinguishing between Schumpeter’s gale and Brecht’s gale can throw into relief the aspirations we pin on theatrical innovation. To demonstrate this I turn to ongoing debates around the politics of postdramatic theatre, and take the 2015 production of Simon Stephen’s Carmen Disruption at London’s Almeida Theatre as a case study. For some, the formal innovations that define postdramatic theatre separate it aesthetically and politically from dramatic theatre in radical ways. Yet celebrations of postdramatic theatre’s political function draw attention away from its social function. To date, theories of postdramatic theatre tell us little about the role postdramatic theatre plays in capitalist society. Instead scholars posit postdramatic theatre as the creative destruction of dramatic form, out of which theatre is renovated to suit the shifting demands of capitalist society. By drawing on Brecht as well as Marxian value-form theorists like Chris Arthur and Michael Heinrich, I offer a Marxist critique of postdramatic theatre, one that insists on the role aesthetic and political innovation play in capitalist reproduction.

Notes

1 Brecht issued this declaration on at least two occasions: in a 1930 essay co-authored with Peter Suhrkamp (Brecht 2015a: 70), and, later, in a 1932 speech (Brecht 2000a: 45).

2 See The New York Innovative Theatre Awards: http://www.nyitawards.com/aboutus

3 Two of the most frequently cited theorists of post-politics in the discourse on postdramatic theatre are Jacques Rancière (1999) and Chantal Mouffe (2005).

4 Brecht reiterated this perspective on the proletarianization of artists in several essays of the early 1930s (see 2015b, 2000b).