ABSTRACT
No critic has described the 'anti-theatrical' dimension of Brecht's aesthetics more clearly than Martin Puchner in his chapter 'Bertolt Brecht: Theatre on a Leash'. The aesthetic strategies that Puchner singles out as modernist drama's tools to redeem itself from its theatrical conditioning are the interconnected principles of diegesis and gesture. This chapter attempts to define Brecht's approach to theatricality from several angles, suggesting that it would be most adequately described as hollow or reduced theatricality, typified by theatre remaining self-conscious of itself, and by its artificial constitution. Brecht's reduced theatricality can be contrasted with a form of saturated theatricality manifested in Diderot's paradoxical aesthetics. Whilst both dramatists can be seen to stand in a tradition of Western epistemology, in which theatricality is negatively defined from the perspective of Plato's anti-theatricality discourse, it is in their responses to this pejorative definition that their approaches differ.
