With a few admittedly great exceptions, writers of drama criticism and aesthetic theory are up against a mystery when they deal with Brecht. The solution cannot be found within the confines of the aesthetic or the academic, but so abhorrent is any venture outside this realm to those who inhabit it that they have devised a special method: mystification. Whatever is an enigma for the theorists must be inherently enigmatic. Decisive questions fly back and forth in the Olympian heights, where the air is thin: Is the enigma of Brecht on the right or on the left? Is Brecht more mysterious as a Communist or as a Man? Can people in Leipzig or Munich better understand the meaning of all the things Brecht did not write? Where are the acrostic punctuation marks which Brecht used to tell us what he really meant? Is the late Brecht more Brecht or less Brecht than the early Brecht? Is Brecht really Brecht at all or was he his own double? Should you read Brecht's own writings to understand him? Did Brecht identify with Mack the Knife or Galileo?

There were nine of Brecht’s plays in the Moscow repertoires during the 1966-67 season — has any city in the world equalled this? Acceptance of Brecht was long in coming, however. There were some early Brecht productions in Moscow: The Threepenny Opera, directed by TaiVov at the Kamerni Theatre in January 1930; selections from Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, staged at the Lenin Komsomol in September 1941. Then nothing, until 1958. Brecht's plays were neither socialistic nor realistic enough for the Stalinist era.

Brecht's influence is to be seen everywhere on the European stage. The peripatetic critic has a wide choice of Brechtian patterns to observe and record—stagecraft, acting, ideas about society, re-interpretation of history—but the one that I find of particular interest is a school of playwriting. It is natural enough that in the English-speaking world we identify principally Brecht's English disciples—John Osborne, Robert Bolt, John Arden; it takes us a little longer, since most of us wait for translations, to discern and interpret the Brechtian vogue on the continent where, possibly, truer disciples are writing their plays.

The fight for survival in the regional theatre begins and ends with a fight for quality. So far, on a trek to the West, Southwest, and Northeast, through 46 theatres in all the possible shapes of professionalism from one paid director to 50 non-Equity paid actors, from university to workshop, I have seen far too little of it. The country is crawling with competence. But from the adequately done Twelfth Nights through the passable Volpones, there is a great aching dearth: nothing is excitingly good or excitingly bad. Nothing horrified me; nothing delighted me. There is very little life out there at all, either generative or even reproductive — the kind of museum life that sends an audience out into the night visibly affected by some longdead playwright's world.