essays [...] I told them a story I thought was well known, though they
hadn’t heard it. Back in the early twenties, Brecht’s plays were not getting
much attention.“What you need,”a friend told him,“is a theory. To make
your stuff important.”So Brecht went home and got himself a theory, which
now is known to more people than are the plays.^61Bentley is just one among several critics who take Brecht’s better-known
and more successful plays to be bad examples (even refutations) of his
theory–indeed, this view may represent the considered opinion of many
theatre theorists and historians. The analysis of Brecht’s individual plays
cannot be undertaken here.^62 However, I would like to warn against one
common criticism: it is often claimed–mistakenly–that Brecht is anti-
emotion, that he doesn’t want his audiences, or indeed his actors, to feel
anything, but rather to think and criticise. Thus, emotionally charged
scenes in Brecht’s plays–of which there are plenty–are taken to be
failures or relapses. But this criticism represents a misunderstanding of
Brecht’s position, as he himself remarks.^63 What he wants is informed
action on the part of spectators, aided by actors. Sometimes, this requires
critical thought; sometimes, it might require making them feel a certain
way. Brecht is happy to use either or both.^64 What really concerns him,
as we have seen, is a kind of unthinking empathy, which, on his view,
leads to resignation and inaction. There are plenty of grounds for criti-
cism on that score–some of which we have discussed–but his suspi-
cions of empathy should not be mistaken for a desire to cut feeling out of
the spectator’s experience.
Conclusion
Because of the shifting nature of politics, any far-reaching analysis of
political theatre will have to consider the relationship between politics
and theatre at particular times and places. Nonetheless, we began this
chapter by trying to draw some general distinctions that might help to
map out the territory, lookingfirst of all at the various meanings of‘politics’
and then some of the ways that play texts and theatrical performances may
have political import. Brecht’s theories–like those of many of the phi-
losophers we examined –cannot ultimately offer what they claim to,
especially in the light of historical developments during and after Brecht’s
lifetime. But what we can see, even from our brief discussion, is some-
thing of why Brecht has remained so influential. What he offered was not
merely a new critique of contemporary theatrical practice–a critique that
has been likened in influence and to some extent in content to that of
Plato; he also offered a vision for a new kind of theatre that would combat
these effects, which combined developments in technology and in
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