Challenging prevailing views of Brecht's theater and politics, Loren Kruger focuses much of her analysis on regions where Brecht has had special resonance, including East Germany and South Africa. She also analyzes political interpretations of Brecht in light of other key dramatists, including Heiner MÜller and Athol Fugard, as well as Brechtian influence on writers and philosophers such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Barthes.

The Drama of South Africa comprehensively chronicles the development of dramatic writing and performance from 1910, when the country came into official existence, to the advent of post-apartheid. Eminent theatre historian Loren Kruger discusses well-known figures, as well as lesser-known performers and directors who have enriched the theatre of South Africa. She also highlights the contribution of women and other minorities, concluding with a discussion of the post-apartheid character of South Africa at the end of the twentieth century.

Product Description: Leontine Sagan was a controversial film director whose film "Girls in Uniform", became a classic of the Weimar and feminist cinema. This autobiography relates how Sagan, the daughter of Jewish parents, grew up in Vienna and Johannesburg, and went on to an acting and directing career in Germany...read more

Product Description: The idea of staging a nation dates from the Enlightenment, but the full force of the idea emerges only with the rise of mass politics. Comparing English, French, and American attempts to establish national theatres at moments of political crisis—from the challenge of socialism in late nineteenth-century Europe to the struggle to "salvage democracy" in Depression America—Kruger poses a fundamental question: in the formation of nationhood, is the citizen-audience spectator or participant?The National Stage answers this question by tracing the relation between theatre institution and public sphere in the discourses of national identity in Britain, France, and the United States...read more

Product Description: Western culture has a long and fraught history of cultural appropriation, a history that has particular resonance within performance practice. Patrice Pavis asks what is at stake - politically and aesthetically - when cultures meet at the crossroads of theatre?