in pain, then reminding me that the person I am seeing is not in fact in
pain–that she is an actress, or a storyteller–might be a way of blocking
that empathetic response. With the empathetic response blocked, I may be
able to take a more critical stance towards the performance: instead of
becoming Oedipus and experiencing his sufferings, I am being told the story
of Oedipus by a group of gifted storytellers and I am able to reflect upon it.
The theatre of the scientific age
A second term Brecht used for his new theatre was the‘theatre of the
scientific age’. Again, some discussion may be helpful. Brecht considered
his age‘scientific’in two senses, which are now so distinct that one would
hardly imagine them together. Indeed, one of them would hardly be
considered‘scientific’at all. Thefirst sense is the one that is still typically
used today: the scientific age was an age of great technological advancement.
Brecht, after all, lived through both World Wars and saw the advent of
the aeroplane, the cinema, and eventually the atom bomb. He was cer-
tainly conscious of the significance of such technological changes.^48
Brecht’s view is clearly that theatre should keep up with science, in other
words that it both make use of new pieces of technology (projection
screens, new kinds of lighting, use offilm as part of theatrical perfor-
mance) and scientific research (statistics given to audience members). This
accounts for his interest in science in thefirst sense.
Note, though, the German term for science, Wissenschaft, is much
broader, and may be used for any organised body of scholarly knowledge
or activity. And one of the intellectual approaches that counted as‘sci-
entific’for Brecht–no less scientific than the physics behind the bomb–
was Marxist economic and political theory. For as well as living through
the invention of the aeroplane, he also lived through the Soviet revolution
of 1917 and, like many, he came to see this as a kind of proof. Thus the
theatre of a scientific age is also an appropriately Marxist theatre. Within this
notion, there are two separate elements that it is helpful to disentangle. First
of all, theatre may be‘scientific’in the sense that it should communicate
the truths discovered by Marxist theory. Thus, a play might in various
ways be able to set the record straight. Telling the truth–making true
claims about how the world is–was explicitly part of the Brechtian
project; and the most important truths he thought he could tell were
those relating to‘the materialistic dialectic of economy and history’.^49 As
we have seen, this is hardly uncomplicated in the context of a theatrical
performance– as Brecht clearly recognised. It’s hard enough to know
what’s true; one also has to communicate it in the appropriate way, to the
appropriate people and so on. Plus, putting oneself in a position of the
truth-teller suggests that one is in a position of superiority in relation to
184 From the Stage to the World