ABSTRACT
In 1978, in an article entitled ‘Brecht, Bond, Gaskill and the Practice of Political Theatre’,
Peter Holland wrote:
The history of the reception of Brecht in Britain is an embarrassing one. A series of
imbalances, of half-aware ideas about the purposes of Brecht’s practical dramaturgy,
were made worse by a far more influential misconception about his politics and the
significance of his politics for his drama. It is to a large extent through a refusal to accept
the fundamentally political basis of Brecht’s theatre practice that critics have created
the illusory split of Brecht into a good playwright and a bad politician.1
