he was determined to ensure that he and his work would be available to both East and West, and thus his commitment to Communism was made on his own terms. Brecht also drew criticism from some of his supporters for appearing to condone Stalin’s barbaric form of Communism in Russia, and again for failing to criticise the East German government’s use of Russian tanks to restore order after the Berlin uprising of June 1953. As Peter Thomson says in his account of Brecht’s life: There is much about him, what he did and what he failed to do, that makes him vulnerable. He was a man who lived untidily, but who combined timorousness and combativeness as few people have. (Thomson and Sachs, 1994, p.38) Crucially, the corollary of Brecht’s Marxism was his creation of play-texts that were based on a social, economic and historical understanding of the development of human life and behaviour and its institutions, and which expressed Brecht’s passionate concern for the poor, the disempowered and the disenfranchised in society. His aim was not just to reflect the real world in his drama but to contribute to its change and improvement. While his deeply felt pacifism was readily acceptable to many at the time of and immediately after the war of 1939– 45, his anti-capitalist stance was more of a problem in the capitalist West. The ideals and heartfelt beliefs expressed in his plays were put into theatrical practice by Brecht operating through a working method and process that was open, experimental and collaborative, and which placed emphasis on the ensemble rather than on the individual performer. And this method and process were (and are) as much a stumbling block to his full acceptance in Britain’s theatre environment as was and is his Marxism per se. To compound the problem, much of his creative work appeared to arrive here already wrapped in the brown paper of Brechtian dramatic theory. There has always been an unwilling-ness in Britain to contemplate or work via a theoretical basis for art. British theatre, it might be argued, has never paid open respect to the intellectual approach; instead, it has thrived on traditional approaches and instinct, not on revolution and theoretical debate. Those ap-proaches include an eclectic manner in the creating of the professional actor (‘training’ is not a prerequisite for membership of the profession), though the predominance of a ‘naturalistic’ performance style in mainstream theatre (supported by television and film) results in the fact that a ‘psychological’ approach to character has been (and is) the dominant approach to a part for most actors. However, the paucity of rehearsal time in the British professional theatre, and the frequent concern on the part of directors to create ‘scenes’ rather than motivation, has encouraged the actors’ reliance on their own instinctual understanding of what a part requires rather than on the development of a systematic process based on training. This, plus a basic