(1) Jan needle & Peter Thomson, “Brecht”, Basill Blackwell 1981; “Brecht was less outraged by the practice of naturalism than by the claim that naturalistic acting was an artistic pursuit of truth. If the beginning is a lie, how can the end be truth? If the prime Endeavour of an actor in a theater is to convince the audience that he is not an actor in a theater, what has success to say to truth? There is, of course, a political point. An audience so willingly deceived in the theater will be willingly deceived at the hustings. If the appearance of accuracy is accepted as ‘truth’, then a capitalist government will be able to sustain itself by reminding the people of jam yesterday, and by creating vivid images of jam tomorrow. / Against a background in the German theater of a deceiving naturalism Brecht hoped to establish an informative realism: ‘Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restriction and independent of convention. Realism means: laying bare society’s causal network / sowing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators / writing from the standpoint of the class which has prepared the broadest solution for the most pressing problems afflicting the human society / emphasizing the dynamics of development / concrete and so as to encourage abstraction.”
Marx Caesar Asimov 