New Left Review I/2, March-April 1960
John Mander
Mr. Esslin’s Little Brecht
Brecht, A Choice of Evils, Martin Esslin. Eyre & Spottiswoode. 36/-.
it may seem foolhardy to criticise a book which Eric Bentley has called “the best thing that has yet been written about Brecht in any language”, and Ken Tynan “a brilliantly perceptive study of the most ambiguous and perpetually fascinating figure of the 20th-century theatre”. Messrs. Bentley and Tynan are, after all, men of the Left. Both knew Brecht personally; and both know as much as anybody about Brecht’s significance for the modern theatre. Why, then, have they followed the ‘bourgeois’ critics in praising a work that, in effect, contradicts all that Brecht stood for?
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