Professor David Barnett FBA

Summary

David Barnett is a theatre researcher who has mainly focused on various understandings of the political on the page and on stage. He has written monographs on Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work in and for the theatre. The latter directly informed the first national exhibition on Fassbinder’s theatre at the Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich, in 2012.

His monograph on the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre company founded by Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel, was the product of twenty months’ archival research. A part of this introduced him to detailed documentations of Brecht’s rehearsal and production practices. These in turn allowed him to develop his own Brechtian approaches to stagecraft that have culminated in practice-research public productions. He also runs workshops, derived from his scholarship, with students and theatre professionals internationally to introduce them to the innovative practices of Brecht’s theatre.

David has also contributed to some key ideas in contemporary theatre. He published a series of articles on postdramatic theatre that helped clarify its implications for written plays. He also sought to define the conditions under which theatre productions could be understood as post-Brechtian. In 2024, he published a short book on theatricality that defined the slippery term in the context of four material processes required to stage a play. That these also reappear in our everyday lives provided a means to examine the politics of theatricality on stage and beyond it.