ABSTRACT
Bertolt Brecht was a highly influential German playwright, poet and theorist of political theatre. His major early success was the Threepenny Opera, at which time he began to develop his conception of an anti-illusionist 'epic' theatre and its allied 'alienation effects' under the combined influence of Marxist theory, Soviet art, Noh theatre, music hall, cabaret and early cinema. Most criticism of Brecht has concentrated on his work in the theatre and has had at some point to address his explicitly Marxist beliefs and his political theory of acting and of the theatre's social function. Epic theatre overthrew certain crucial positions of bourgeois theatre by productions which were superior in method and precision to productions of the bourgeois theatre. Georg Lukacs and Brecht engaged in a debate on the issues of realism and popular art in the 1930s in what has become a major reference point in Marxist aesthetics.
