Anja Hartl. Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama. Dialectical Theatre Today. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2021. 192 pages.

The title of this book may well remind readers of Janelle Reinelt's landmark study, After Brecht. British Epic Theater (1994). Anja Hartl is, of course, well aware of the burden and the attendant pressure she has put herself under, and indeed situates her study as a successor to Reinelt's in her Introduction. She notes how Reinelt worried about Brecht's applicability to British theater in the wake of the upheavals of Thatcherism. That is, she wondered whether his approaches may no longer be effective or even relevant in the context and implications of the neoliberal politics that were gradually transforming all areas of British society. Hartl, with the benefit of hindsight, addresses Reinelt's concerns by invoking post-Brechtian theater and seeking it out in eight case studies.

Hartl's starting point, as the subtitle to her book makes clear, is the importance of dialectic in Brecht's theater, both theoretically and practically. However, she acknowledges that Brecht's bounding of the dialectic within Marxist categories and notions of mastery over his social objects of enquiry no longer satisfactorily respond to the contemporary world. She goes on to enlist some familiar intellectual figures to expand the scope of Brecht's dialectic: Adorno and Rancière. Adorno's negative dialectics, of course, take pride of place, but the philosopher also offers useful help in the form of his own dialectical investigation of rationality and his more pervading articulation of the negative. Rancière's categories of dissensus, the reorganization of the sensible, and the emancipated spectator help Hartl think through audience dynamics productively. Walter Benjamin also makes occasional but no less valid contributions to the arguments, particularly in his thoughts on shock and his articulation of dialectics at a standstill. Taken together, the thinkers lead Hartl to a nuanced and flexible definition of the post-Brechtian that does not seek to satisfy a rigid set of axioms but prefers to approach Brecht's legacy “as a means of apprehending and analysing the contemporary world … and as an aesthetic strategy” (22).

Hartl focuses her attention on five playwrights and theater-makers: Mark Ravenhill, David Greig, the collaborators Andy Smith and Tim Crouch, and Caryl Churchill. Each of the four chapters (Smith and Crouch feature in one) looks at two key works, and each chapter confronts a different set of theatrical problems.