Chapter 24 - Brecht in Southern Africa

Summary

Although Brecht entered the South African repertoire only in the 1950s, 1930s political theater drew communists and other leftists local and expatriate including Kurt Baum who worked with Piscator and thus in the same milieu as Brecht in 1920s Berlin. Despite notoriety as a leftist writer, Brecht featured as a star of European art theater and a sign of high culture on university stages in the1950s and in subsidized theaters in the 1960s striving to represent “Western civilization” against alleged threats from communism or African nationalism. In contrast, the anti-apartheid theater of the 1970s–1990s from Fugard and Serpent Players to Junction Avenue Theatre with Purkey, Makhene and others, and the Market Theatre with Simon and others deployed the Lehrstück, epic theater, and Brechtian pedagogy to challenge the power of state and capital with activists and workers as well as professional performers. Postapartheid theater has borrowed from Boal as well as Brecht to create participatory dramaturgies for tackling crises such as AIDS, gender violence, and corruption in state and local government.