Performing Brecht: Forty Years of British Performances by Margaret Eddershaw (review)

Book Reviews 175 funding shift from the Eurocentric word (opera, ballet, symphony) to the local, "new nation" stone, a huge shake-up of peI:Sonnel and priorities (2502 ). At the other end of the process, Sitas's beautifully written piece, mixing sociological research and the militant lyricism that is his signature, opens this way: "We start from a simple fact: that all we have are our bodies and what our brains redraft as stories" (J32). In his address to the Natal trade union leadership of COSATU, what he presents is both the stone of an embodied politics (SARMCOL workers' plays The Long March, Bambatha's Children, and Mbube) and the word of a new theatre language. ''Through them, something special has happened in Natal despite the violence" (J 39) - in which, in 1992, 85 per cent of the workers in this theatre experienced "assaults, skirmishes and violent combat including hospitalisation" (J 35). When actors are assassinated for their roles (a process of violent intimidation also reported in the essays by Jerry Mofokeng and Matthew Krouse) and the long march of theatre continues nevertheless, the word has become a stone; and the stone is being caught and flung back as a new word. Davis's and Fuchs's knowing compilation of voices includes splendid pieces from academics like Martin Orkin; leading black directors, actors, and playwrights (some also academics) like Jerry Mofokeng (Markei Theatre resident director), Maishe Maponya (author of Gangsters), Zakes Mda (prolific playwright and Theatre of Development theorist), Doreen M32ibuko , Fatima Dike (author of So What's New?), and Ramolao Makhene; and other movers and shakers, mostly based in Johannesburg (the Cape Town scene is not really covered by the book), like the late Barney Simon of the Market Theatre, Robert McLaren of the old Workshop '71, Anthony Akerman ("Theatre in Exile"), William Kentridge (his puppet-theatre work Woyzeck on the Highveld), Matthew Krouse (with a brilliant, hilarious essay on the banned gay political cabaret Famous Dead Man), and Malcolm Purkey (the Junction Avenue Theatre Company's work - also using puppetry Tooth and Nail). The title carries no thesis, and there is contestation rather than consensus in these voices; words, and stones, fly! But I think Fleishman is right about that aesthetic and political choice (a recent issue of Theater , 25:3, which reviews the J994 Grahamstown festival, bears it out); this book is an essential record of its history in the making. The photographs are glorious. ANTIION'( O'BRIEN, QUEENS COlLEGE, CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK MARGARET EDDERSHAW. Performing Brecht: Forty Years of British Performances . London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. x, 188. $18.95 (PB). The title of this book promises more than it can deliver. It is the subtitle, 176 Book Reviews "Forty Years of British Perfonnances," that accurately describes this work. The author has expanded her essay on Brechtian acting which appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. In this essay, Eddershaw stresses that the difference between Brecht and Stanislavsky resides in the fact that Brechtian actors are motivated by social consciousness, while Stanislavskian actors are introspectively psychological. What we have in the full-length study is primarily an analysis of Brecht on the British stage. Because influential theories such as Brecht's are rarely tidy and selfcontained ideas moving smoothly from one language, habit,-and culture to another, Eddershaw has difficulty making her case. She must settle instead for sketches of several significant British theatres, directors, and actors perfonning Brecht in Britain. In chapter I, Eddershaw maintains that a Brechtian actor must have an awareness of Marxism, encourage social change, and understand epic theatre. She aknowledges that Wedekind, Charlie Chaplin, Karl Valentin, Meyerhold, and most importantly, Chinese acting, with its emphasis on "cooler" observa· tion of events, significantly influenced Brecht. In addition, Eddershaw accurately defines the Brechtian audience experience: "not that an audience should not feel, but that he [Brecht) intends them to feel different emotions from those being expressed by the characters on stage" (16). The author astutely observes that Brecht "exhorted actors to make an 'inventory' of the role and thereby to emphasize the contradictions, the lack of logic and consistency, in the character's behavior" (19). However, Eddershaw encounters difficulty...