In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest European playwrights of the twentieth century. The aim of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was to make the familiar ‘strange’: with plays such as Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle he wanted his audience not to sit back but to engage, observe and discover the contradictions in life, and act on what they learnt. He developed this approach in turbulent times, from Weimar Germany to the rise of the Nazis, to exile in Scandinavia and America and then post-war life in East Berlin, and he has since inspired dramatists around the world.WithLaura Bradley Professor of German and Theatre at the University of EdinburghDavid Barnett Professor of Theatre at the University of YorkAnd Tom Kuhn Professor of Twentieth Century German Literature, Emeritus Fellow of St Hugh's College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio productionReading list: David Barnett, Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014