Bertolt Brecht and Football, or Playwright versus Playmaker

Abstract

We have Frederick Jameson’s assurance that it is dangerous to dismiss the major debates on aesthetics that took place among radical and left-wing writers between the wars, and it is the aim of this short article to suggest a new and more contemporary framework for the theatrical theories developed by Bertolt Brecht at that time. If it is the case that the arguments surrounding a left-wing interpretation of realism in general and Brecht’s ‘Epic Theatre’ in particular do indeed ‘… rise up to haunt those of us who thought that we could now go on to something else and leave the past behind us’,¹ this might be best appreciated by placing football and Epic Theatre alongside each other and evaluating the former according to the explicit aims of the latter. The result will be to argue the case, at the very least, for the formal properties of football at the expense of theatre. It will be to suggest that football be taken seriously by those interested in Marxist debates on aesthetics and, above all, it will result in exposing why the Brechtian experiments in the theatre are doomed to fail within the terms of their own realist objectives.