The Age of Distantiation

Bertolt Brecht was a theatre practitioner in the first half of the 20th Century. He recognised the power of cinema and its disruptive effect on theatre. Film was better able to realistically capture the intimacy of human interaction and created a ‘nearness of experience’ that the theatre wasn’t able to replicate. This didn’t however, at least to Brecht, mean theatre was redundant. Instead, he developed what he called ‘Epic Theatre’, which argued…