Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter (review)

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians is an ambitious and engaging study that takes the reader on a time-travelling journey through the past, present and future of Brechtian theatre. Taking in pivotal events such as the 1737 Licensing Act and the 2011 occupy wall street movement, Schechter establishes not only the ways in which Brecht "went back in time for co-authors as well as forward in his collaborations" (8), but also that a significant body of eighteenth-century drama met the criteria for Brecht's Epic theatre, two centuries before the german playwright penned his theory.

"The first one to propose a 'Historic Line of the Epic Theatre'", dating back to the Elizabethan era, "was Brecht himself" (258), but while other writers have explored German antecedents, none have previously considered who the early English Epic playwrights and performers might be. Schechter's starting point is the two eighteenth-century works that Brecht and his collaborators adapted: John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), which became The Threepenny Opera (1928), and George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer (1706), "reutilised" in 1955 as Trumpets and Drums. In the course of exploring the original and reimagined texts and performances, Schechter draws in other works and authors, ultimately building up a rich and detailed picture of the world of Augustan and Georgian satire.

An extensive first chapter introduces Schechter's key players and conceits. Alongside Gay and Farquhar, we meet: cross-dressing actress Charlotte Charke; Samuel Foote and his empire-critiquing play The Nabob; Henry fielding's anti-bribery rehearsal play Pasquin; and Jonathan Swift, whose pseudonymous Polite Conversation poked fun at colley cibber, one of the villains in Schechter's book. The twenty-three chapters that follow are self-contained essays that vary in size, from two-page microanalyses to in-depth studies of particular historical figures or events, all viewed through a Brechtian lens. Schechter skilfully weaves in parallels to current events, comparing, for example, Robert Walpole's parliamentary persecution of Fielding and his fellow satirists to the secrecy violation charges levelled against whistle-blowers Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange by the Us government (111).

Schechter's Brechtian distaste for the corruption and excess of twenty-first century capitalism is most evident in 'Macheath Our Contemporary', a "recently discovered" confession by The Beggar's/Threepenny Opera 's Mack the Knife, who has transformed himself from highwayman to international financier. Now based in his own new york skyscraper and benefiting from government bailouts à la Goldman Sachs, Mack is delighted by banking deregulation: "where else", he asks, "could a man like me borrow trillions?" (62). This is one of many "historical fictions" scattered throughout the text, from supplements to Brecht's Messingkauf Dialogues to "speculative reconstructions of theatre events for which historical facts are missing" (3). These creative elements ensure that Eighteenth-Century Brechtians is not only illuminating but engaging, and articulates one of Schechter's central tenets: that theatrical activism is as necessary now as it was in the eras of Gay and Brecht, and that practitioners today could learn much from the radical subversives of the past.