Where Extremes Meet

For about 30 years in the middle of the 20th century, Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht dominated Western theater by virtue of their difference. Beckett represented a theater of the absurd and Brecht a theater of political commitment, each defining the other by their incompatibilities. Only their successors began to question the dichotomies and to draw on both their legacies. This volume looks back at the common ground of these two dramatists: their modernism and its legacy, their innovations in new media, the ways they directed their own work, and the shape of their thinking and writing. This territory is explored from the various perspectives of directors, dramaturgs, actors, and theorists in these contributions from a 2001 symposium at the University of Dublin.