HANS-THIES LEHMANN: POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE (2003)

“Hans-Thies Lehmann, the author of an extensive synthetic study Postdramatic Theatre, is a bit more renowned with the audience of this place above all due to translations of some of his articles, published in the Maska magazine in the last years. But these are merely crumbs from the abundant opus of the German theoretician of theatre and dramatics. Hans-Thies Lehmann originates from a theoretical tradition that merges the French post-structuralism and the materialist theories of literature and performing arts. In the eighties, his book Contributions to the Materialist Theory of Literature was published, along with numerous contributions about the authors like Georges Bataille, Georg Büchner and Heiner Müller. In the nineties, Lehmann was giving lectures and publishing articles also on Bertolt Brecht, by whom he was fascinated chiefly because of his concepts of epic theatre, denationalizing effect, plot, gestus, etc. Lehmann’s interest in the work of Heiner Müller, a great admirer of Brecht and at the same time his inexorable critic, continues without interruptions to this day, when his newest book is about to be published about this, as they used to say, “German- German” author. Before that, the publishing house of the Berlin theatre newspaper Theater der Zeit published the book Political Writing, in which he has gathered some essays on (mostly German) dramatics, which were written in the last twenty years. /…/

The book Postdramatisches Theater was published in 1999 by a respectable German publishing house Verlag der Autoren and has raised a lot of interest, even the conservative Theater Heute wrote about the book, and the other theatre newspapers in German language didn’t fall behind (such as Theater der Zeit), there are frequent references on his book also in the English (such as Modern Drama) and other newspapers.

The author states in the introduction that in doing this research, he was not guided by a need for a detailed “inventorisation” of numerous appearance forms and actors, but was rather following the “aesthetical logics” of the new theatre. /…/”

From the accompanying text by Aldo Milohnić

TRANSFORMACIJE SERIES 12
Slovene edition.
Regular price: 20.45 EUR
25% discount for Maska subscribers: 15.34 EUR

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