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Join us for a lecture with our Distinguished Max Kade Visiting Professor Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, “Theater for Everyone and No One” on Wednesday October 16th at 5:30pm in Kresge 1515

Brecht’s criticism of his most successful play, Life of Galileo, as “all too opportunistic" raises the question of what led Brecht to write first Senora Carrar’s rifles and then Life of Galileo contre coeur, as it were, not according to the “highest technical standard” and what he saw as the “opportunism” of the Galileo play: According to his tendency, it is written as theatre for everyone. This is countered by Brecht’s constant defence of the refractory element of art: that it is written for no one. In all his late plays, a conflict manifests itself between a Theatre for Everyone and a Theatre for No one. In his unpublished fragments, he recorded the compromises of the published texts. At the same time, something lives on in his Theatre for No one that can be described as messianic with Brecht’s notes of the 1920s: the memory of his conception of a radically impossible theatre, which he had worked on in his fragments Fatzer and Brotladen, a theatre of potentiality.