David Barnett

Bertolt Brecht is one of the most important theorists and practitioners of theatre in the twentieth century. He asked fundamental questions about how we represent the world, challenging Stanislavski’s belief that we merely need to reproduce the world on stage. Instead, Brecht proposed that we don’t reflect reality, but interrogate it in rehearsal and performance.

And while Stanislavsky developed a range of practical approaches to realizing his aims, Brecht set out his ambitions for a new theatre, but provided very few practical exercises for future directors and actors. Instead, he invited theatre-makers to engage with his ideas and develop their own practices, appropriate to their own theatrical traditions and contexts.

Professor David Barnett presents a unique set of credentials as both an academic and a practitioner. He has extensively researched Brecht’s own stagecraft, spending 20 months in archives to produce the first ever study, in any language, of Brecht theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble. Drawing on his research, he also published the book Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (2014) to introduce readers to the complex interplay of theory and practice.

Barnett then developed his own practice through the ‘Brecht in Practice’ research project. He applied Brechtian ideas to staging two plays not written in the Brechtian tradition, Patrick Marber’s Closer and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. His work is both documented in an open, online resource, brechtinpractice.net and in scholarly articles that reflect on his work.

As such, Barnett offers unique insights into Brecht’s practice, drawing on his expert and groundbreaking research and his practical experiments. His influence can be felt in the only other book-length publication on Brechtian theatre practice, Brecht: A Practical Handbook, by David Zoob, which Barnett edited and for which Barnett wrote the Foreword. Barnett has conducted Brecht workshops in all four nations of the United Kingdom on many occasions and further afield.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Brecht’s practice was disseminated by the people who worked with him in Berlin. They toured the world introducing his approaches and his methods. These people are now dead, and Barnett presents the only opportunity to engage with a scholar with an international reputation and a practitioner with extensive workshop and production experience.

Reviews – Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance