CONTROVERSIAL EFFECT OF BERTOLT BRECHT’S EPIC THEATRE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH POLITICAL DRAMA AND ITS ILLUSTRATION IN DAVID HARE’S FANSHEN

Abstract

British political drama took its place on contemporary British stage without the boundaries of a certain manifesto but with the political consciousness of a group of leftist playwrights in the late 1960s. It reflected the disillusionment of these playwrights with the Labour Party politics at home and with some worldwide events like the Vietnam War, student riots in Paris, Soviet Russia’s interventions in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia. British political dramatists wrote explicitly politically and produced their plays, in the first place, by the help of fringe theatre companies, which were touring and which took theatre to the public. Bertolt Brecht was one of the most important literary influences on the development of British political drama, which was mostly denied by political dramatists. Brecht’s impact dated back not only to his theatre company Berliner Ensemble’s visit to London in 1958 but even before the World War II. British playwrights and directors in 1950s and 1960s got acquainted with Brecht’s works both in Britain and in Germany and they helped to introduce Brecht’s epic theatre on British stage. This generation of playwrights and directors paved the way for the development of political drama in Britain. Even though political dramatists did conceal, Brecht’s epic theatre was, in literary terms, one of the greatest influences on political drama. This study will briefly talk about the development of British political drama and then it will reveal to what extent Brecht’s epic theatre affected British political playwrights. Lastly, it will explore Brechtian influences in a play Fanshen (1975) by one of the representative political playwrights, David Hare.