Book review

Abstract

In Space and Time in Epic Theater: The Brechtian Legacy, Sarah Bryant-Bertail weaves together semiotics, postmodern historiography, and historical materialism, analyzing epic theatre from its inception to its contemporary manifestations in Europe, India, and the US. The book bears some comparison to Freddie Rokem’s Performing History in its theorizing about historicity and its broad range of theatrical examples. But instead of theorizing generally about history and its relation to representation, she grounds her analysis specifically in the self-conscious historicity of epic theatre. What distinguishes epic theatre is its foregrounding of the construction of space and time, its “dynamic, selfaware representations of space, time and history” (8), without any attempt to reconcile contradictions or tensions between these representations. According to Bryant-Bertail, Brecht and Piscator closely followed Marx’s historical materialism: “the theater was to demystify the operation of social, economic, and political forces by showing how certain orders of reality had developed historically and were perpetuated” (2–3). In this way, she articulates semiotics itself as a political gesture, echoing Eco’s idea that “because semiotics can reveal the construction of ideological texts, . . . it can be a form of social criticism and thus a form of social practice” (72). In epic theatre, everything is “history in the making,” or, as Bryant-Bertail phrases it, “the staging of historicity itself,” revealing history as “eminently changeable, a continuing work capable of being rewritten” (5). Herein lies its political efficacy, for the present as well as for the past.