Bertolt Brecht, Visual Imagination and Fragmentation

About the Event

This roundtable event celebrates the first exhibition dedicated to the visual production of legendary German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). brecht: fragments, held at Raven Row, London, features original material from the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin, alongside performances of interwoven scenes from Brecht’s early dramatic fragments.

The roundtable brings together critics, theorists, historians and leading Brecht scholars who will explore the work of Bertolt Brecht in relation to fragmentation and visual imagination.

The discussion will be chaired by Dr Lizzie Stewart (King’s College London), with writer and director Dr Phoebe von Held, Prof. Tom Kuhn (Oxford), Dr Shane Boyle (Queen Mary University London), Dr Martin Brady (King’s College London) and Prof. Sarah E James (Liverpool School of Art and Design).

brecht: fragments is curated by Phoebe von Held, in collaboration with Tom Kuhn, Alex Sainsbury, and Iliane Thiemann from the Bertolt Brecht Archive at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Speaker Bios: 

Shane Boyle is Senior Lecturer in the Drama Department at Queen Mary University of London. His books include The Arts Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2024) and the co-edited collection Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Methuen 2019). He is currently a research fellow in Munich at the Käte Hamburger Research Center—global dis:connect.

Martin Brady is Emeritus Reader in German and Film Studies at King’s College London. He has published on European film (including Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, documentary, and Brechtian cinema), music (Arnold Schönberg, Paul Dessau, and Krautrock), philosophy, literature (including Elfriede Jelinek and Barbara Honigmann), Jewish exile architects, the visual arts (Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer), disability, foraging and ordinariness.

Phoebe von Held is a London-based director, theatre-maker and scholar. She specialises in adapting, translating and staging unconventional literary texts to create performance pieces that speak to contemporary socio-political crises. Her scholarly work is situated at the intersection of German, French and Theatre Studies, with Brecht as one of her key interests. She is the author of Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot after Brecht and the translator of Brecht’s Fleischhacker (with Matthias Rothe), published in Brecht and the Writer’s Workshop (Bloomsbury/Methuen, 2019).

Sarah E. James is an art historian, writer and curator. She teaches at Liverpool School of Art and Design, and she researches and writes on contemporary art, photography and politics, the visual culture of the Cold War, and East Germany. She is the author of Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Beyond the Iron Curtain (Yale University Press, 2013) and Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant-Garde (The MIT Press, 2022)

Tom Kuhn is an Emeritus Fellow of St Hugh’s College Oxford, where he was Professor of twentieth-century German Literature. He is the principal editor (and one of the translators) of the English-language edition of Brecht’s works. Major publications include Brecht on Theatre and Brecht on Performance (both 2014), The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (2018), and Brecht and the Writer’s Workshop: Fatzer and Other Dramatic Projects (2019). He has also collaborated extensively with musicians, visual artists and theatre makers.

Lizzie Stewart is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at King’s. Her work addresses labour migration and cultural production, with a focus on theatrical entanglements between Turkey and Germany, including with regard to Brechtian and post-Brechtian theatre. She is the author of Performing New German Realities: Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration (Palgrave 2021) and of articles on gestus in the ‘postmigrant theatre’ movement in Germany. With Phoebe von Held, she co-translated Brecht’s fragment The Flood, which forms part of the current performance at Raven Row.

This is a free event. For directions to the Macadam Building, please follow this link.