Brecht and the Art of Spectatorship

Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre sought to change how spectators watched performances, equipping them to critique and intervene in the world outside the theatre.Taking its cue from his call for theatre to develop 'the art of spectatorship', this major new study explores vision, observation, and spectatorship in twelve of his plays, spanning his career.It relates this analysis to Brecht's own formative experiences of spectatorship, to his poems and theories, and to productions directed by Brecht and his close collaborators.Finally, it investigates Brecht's attempts to transform the composition of the audience and cultivate critical spectatorship at the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre he founded with his wife, the actor Helene Weigel, in East Berlin after the Second World War.Brecht's plays foreground scenarios in which watching matters, as characters witness acts of injustice, watch trials or punishments, engage in surveillance, or observe scientific experiments.These instances of onstage s