The Studio
Four stars
Hollywood might have ended up a very different place if America’s House Un-American Activities Committee hadn’t assured everyone they accused of being communists was blacklisted. One of those questioned by the committee was Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright who had already been in exile since he left Germany in 1933 as the rise of the Nazis left his politically charged work somewhat out of goosestep.
Having only been in America for a year when he appeared before the HUAC in 1947, he left the country the day after and eventually went back to East Germany, where he founded the Berliner Ensemble. As with other great drama created by HUAC hounded artists, such unintended consequences can create great accidental legacies.
Brecht’s exile and his appearance before the committee are the starting point for this intense construction by Lebanese artistic duo Lina Majdalanie and Rabih MrouĆ©. Presented alongside pianist Henrik Kairies, the result is part performed lecture, part cabaret. In execution it is also a nod to their own exile when they moved from Beirut to Berlin a decade ago.
Sat at desks from which they recount their thesis, they are accompanied by assorted images, archive footage and as many pictures as the Brecht estate will allow. These are beamed on to a screen behind them to create a show-and-tell style narrative that is both witty and educational.
The part where the duo attempt to work their way around being refused use of a particular image by the Brecht estate is a hoot, and recalls a similar situation when New York avant-gardists The Wooster Group were refused permission to use the courtroom scene from Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. This was to form part of their show, L.S.D. (…Just the High Points…), which for its 1986 Edinburgh International Festival run was somewhat gingerly renamed as the less controversial The Road to Immortality Part 2.
Like Majdalanie and MrouĆ©, The Wooster Group navigated their way around the refusal by making something new. Miller, of course, was another writer who had fallen foul of the HUAC after being named as a Communist Party member by director Elia Kazan. The Crucible was Miller’s response. Interestingly, Majdalanie and MrouĆ©’s tables and chairs staging of their presentation is not unlike that used by the Wooster Group in L.S.D.
If there are several layers of irony in all this in terms of censorship as the mother of invention, Majdalanie and MrouĆ© also know a good tune when they hear one. This is where the cabaret bit of the show comes in, as Kairies’ renditions of several numbers penned by Brecht with composer Hanns Eisler recall a time when Brechtian cabaret was all the rage. The likes of Dagmar Krause, Sarah-Jane Morris and Ute Lemper have all sung Brecht on Edinburgh stages.
This is not to make light of Majdalanie and MrouĆ©’s meditations. For all the density of their work and their own issues with censorship, they have channelled this into a fascinating multi-layered montage that speaks out across generations and continents in an international language of artistic dissent.
Until Aug 17, 7.30pm.
The Herald, August 18, 2026
ends
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