Modern Drama

“[P]ost-dramatic theatre hums the tune we want to hear – the great song of compliance”: so thundered German critic Robin Detje, in 2010, a decade after Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre made its decisive intervention in contemporary theatre studies. Detje was not alone in worrying about the political implications of the theatrical norm we have come to know as “postdramatic,” a paradigm exemplified by artists like Forced Entertainment, René Pollesch, and the Wooster Group. With its penchant for reflexiveness and undecidability, this theatre seems to have renounced, not only realistic drama’s interest in critiquing social problems, but the mid-century avant-garde’s commitment to a passionate, liberating mode of collective expression. Is postdramatic theatre a theatre that has given up on changing the world?

Not according to the editors and authors of Postdramatic Theatre and the Political. In this collection, various case studies ground a series of arguments ascribing political force – variously conceived – to experimental theatre. As a whole, the book offers an important rejoinder to claims about postdrama’s political apathy. It is not the first project to do so; among others, Lehmann himself has repeatedly taken up the issue since Postdramatic Theatre was published. But the latter has remained the definitive text for postdramatic discourse, and as Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera note, in their contribution to Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, “[i]t is difficult to escape the impression that Lehmann in [the earlier] book . . . was not primarily interested in political questions” (71). Brandon Woolf offers a different assessment, arguing that Lehmann’s book is, in fact, “deeply engaged with the ‘political’” (33). Whatever their readings of Postdramatic Theatre, the essays collected here all seek to draw out the terms in which postdramatic theatre’s political engagement can be measured.

As the title suggests, most of these scholars locate political value in aesthetic criteria that distinguish this kind of theatre from other modes. (Borowski and Sugiera’s piece, which argues for a renewed focus on individual [End Page 140] productions’ socio-historical contexts, is an exception.) They frequently emphasize the heightened responsibility that devolves on the spectator, when normal procedures – hermeneutic or behavioural – break down. Lehmann’s contribution to the volume, “A Future for Tragedy? Remarks on the Political and the Postdramatic,” describes the “dramaturgy of the spectator” (89) that emerges in a recent piece by Egyptian artist Laila Soliman, after each audience member is handed a letter of protest addressed to the International Court of Human Rights. “I have the chance of an experience with myself: suddenly I feel the demand which this envelope is addressing to me,” Lehmann writes; there is “no acting out of a dramatic story. But there is the audience” (89). Similarly, Antje Dietze describes the complex portrayal of 1968 student activists, in a 1996 production by German artist Christoph Schlingensief: “The actors denied the spectators any secure external perspective from which to judge, and as a consequence the latter were thrown back on themselves, forced to assess their own involvement with the activist inheritance as well as their own desire for revolt” (137). If contemporary experimental theatre is often accused of solipsism, such readings do not so much contest that charge as suggest that a certain kind of solipsism may be a necessary prelude to responsible action.

In 1999, Lehmann argued that “Postdramatic theatre is a post-Brechtian theatre” (Postdramatic 33), and Brecht remains an important point of reference in this collection. In their introduction, the editors offer a helpful account of continuities and distinctions between epic and postdramatic constellations. Karen Jürs-Munby, one of the editors, was the translator of Postdramatic Theatre; her introduction to that work begins with a warning against reading the “post” as a simple supersession of drama, and the first two essays in the present volume, by Woolf and David...