ROBERT BRUSTEIN
657
In short, while Shaw was able to imagine utopias, Brecht was
too honest to do more than suggest why they were necessary. As a
secret Aristotelean, a suppressed tragic writer, he was compelled to
examine the cruel exigencies of contemporary life, but his Platonic
impulses were not strong enough to let him indulge in fantasies of
the future.
If
Brecht was among the first to put his poetry at the ser–
vice of the mass state, he was perhaps the last to find a channel–
using a strategy of simultaneous engagement and detachment- be–
tween the Scylla and Charybdis of art and politics. After Brecht, we
find the theater more openly divided between the utilitarians and the
aesthetes, between those who find an exclusively social-political
function for the theater, and those who largely deny all interest in
the public dimension.
Thus, in totalitarian countries, theater is used primarily as a
form of political consolidation, reinforcing the existing regime, or as
a covert form of subversion and resistance, while the theater of the
capitalist countries, despite occasional eruptions of political con–
sciousness, grows increasingly private, limited largely to escapist,
domestic, psychological, even narcissistic subjects.
It is a generalization, of course, that admits of many exceptions
in the Western countries. I am happy to acknowledge them, though
few are particularly distinguished works. America in the thirties, for
example, produced a highly engaged political theater (Clifford Odets,
John Howard Lawson, the Federal Theatre, Theatre Union, etc.),
vestiges of which would appear during the postwar years, especially
in the drama of Arthur Miller, while the anarchic Living Theatre,
typifying the radical sixties in its Platonic scorn of imitation, tried to
break down barriers between stage and audience altogether. The
theater in Great Britain, from the time of the "angry young men" in
the late fifties until today, has featured a strong strain of radical con–
sciousness, partly in reaction to the mainstream tradition of West
End drawing room comedies and seaside resort dramas, from the
plays ofJohn Arden and John Osborne twenty years ago to the cur–
rent work of David Hare, David Edgar, Howard Brenton, and Caryll
Churchill. And there is probably no more committed political writer
in the contemporary theater than the Marxist Italian farceur, Daria
Fo. Still, I believe that the Platonic and the Aristotelean approaches
to the stage have each grown more extreme, in response to the pres–
sures and exigencies of the mass industrial state. Political theater has
tended to become either official propaganda, on behalf of the social–
ist present, or polemical preachment in support of a fancied Utopian
future, while the mainstream aesthetic theater has settled for those
