The evolution and form of documentary theatre : Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, Peter Weiss

In the 1920s, two young Germans, Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), a director, and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), a playwright, dissatisfied with the limited scope of Realism and with the subjectivity of Expressionism, laid the groundwork for a theatre of political and social ideas, a didactic theatre, to which they applied the term "Epic" in order to denote its broad canvas and its narrative character. In the Epic form, dramatic emphasis shifted from the character to the event, from the individual to society as a whole. At the time, although Piscator was insisting that the theatre become a tribunal, he had difficulty in finding suitable plays. It was not until 1962, after the war and his exile of eighteen years, that Piscator was able to direct plays of the type he had been seeking since the twenties. When he was given the direction of the Freie Volksbuehne of Berlin (1962), he presented three new works by three new authors: The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth in 1963, In The Matter Of J, Robert Oppenheimer by Heinar Kipphardt in 1964, and The Investigation by Peter Weiss in 1965. These dramas in which political consciousness is wedded to highly documentary modes of production represent a new genre, Documentary Theatre. In this thesis, I propose to examine the evolution and form of Documentary Theatre in West Germany and to conduct an analysis of selected dramatic works of Hochhuth, Kipphardt, and Weiss in light of this political genre.