Examining and contesting the emergence of ‘third world theatre’ in the mid twentieth century, Brueton traces how Jean-Marie Serreau, the director feted for his inaugural productions of absurdist plays by Ionesco and Beckett, sought to disrupt the Eurocentric nihilism of the post-war dramatic canon. Serreau brought the anticolonial drama unfolding throughout the Empire to Parisian stages. Producing seminal works by the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine, Martinican poet, playwright and politician Aimé Césaire, and French iconoclast Jean Genet, Serreau pursued a radical new humanism that aimed to decentre the intellectual and artistic hegemony of the West. He envisaged a third world theatre that would not only eschew the ghettoization of major Francophone playwrights but also contest the very values of colonial humanism that had developed under France’s Third Republic. Brueton compares Kateb’s representation of the anticolonial uprisings in Algeria in Le Cadavre Encerclé (The Encircled Corpse, 1958); Genet’s critique of French imperialism and Algerian neo-nationalism in Les Paravents (The Screens, 1966); and Césaire’s tragic exposition of Congolese independence from Belgium in Une saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1967), to argue that they refuse forms of understanding where cultural difference is reduced to one decolonial agenda.

This chapter investigates the nature of the well-documented influence of the German playwright, theorist and director Bertolt Brecht on the Syrian playwright Sa’dallah Wannous. In addition to examining theoretical and indirect links between the two, such as Wannous’ interviews and friendships in France with Brechtian theatre artists and scholars such as Jean-Marie Serreau, Jean-Louis Barrault, Peter Weiss and Bernard Dort, this chapter looks at Wannous’ creation of innovative hybrid works that utilized Brechtian dramaturgical techniques alongside traditional Arabic performative modes. The chapter also analyzes manifestations of these re-workings of Brechtian dramaturgical models in performance in two very different stagings, one in former East Germany and the other in the former Soviet Union, of one of Wannous’ most innovative plays, The Adventure of the Head of Mamlouk Jabir. It also highlights Wannous’ participation in the Brecht Dialogue in 1968 in East Berlin, which commemorated the playwright’s seventieth birthday, and the documents and theatrical programs from that event that were recently found in Wannous’ personal library, which is now housed at the American University of Beirut.