ABSTRACT
There are generally agreed to be three main streams in twentieth-century theatre: Realism-Naturalism, usually associated with Stanislavsky; Surrealism and the ‘theatre of the absurd’, whose best-known practitioner was probably Artaud; and finally, ‘public’, political, social, epic theatre, generally linked with Brecht. The roots of this third, Brechtian theatrical form are usually sought in the theatre of German Expressionism, the work of Büchner and Wedekind, the fairgrounds and cabarets Brecht frequented as a youth, even (as a reaction) Wagner’s grandiose theories. But actually the specific form was first and in some ways most clearly utilised in the theatre of the Russian Revolution by those who wished to create an ‘October in the theatre’. Meyerhold should perhaps be regarded as the real founder of it, yet Eisenstein is probably the practitioner who most clearly crystallised it.
