The first event of the Recycling Brecht symposium took place on June 25, 2016 (the day after the Brexit vote result was announced) at Oxford's North Wall Arts Centre, with multi-award-winning playwright Tony Kushner in conversation with Brecht scholar Tom Kuhn.

Kuhn: It's not every day that you get to introduce the greatest English-language playwright since … (maybe) Pinter! But Tony is a man whose works demand superlatives of us. His great 1994 play Angels in America is one of those truly exceptional works which is—perhaps a little bit like the Threepenny Opera—always playing somewhere in the world. In fact if you have a private jet at your disposal, you’re just in time to set off for the second half at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg.

For that play Tony won a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, and then in 2013 a National Arts Medal from Barack Obama. His plays are extraordinary in the breadth of their intellectual and formal ambition, and in their political and moral passion. I wanted to say he's created a whole new theatrical language for a generation, but I think actually there are so few people who can tread in his footsteps and develop what he's done—who have either the writerly skills or the chutzpah to bring Angels to America or a Homebody to Kabul.

He's also a great Brecht fan—which is why he's here. He's translated The Good Person of Szechwan and adapted that and Mother Courage—the latter was of course a triumph on Broadway in 2006 with Meryl Streep.

We’re here to talk about Brecht, and the importance of Brecht for your work and in your work, but I can't resist first asking you what you make of the most recent political developments in this sad country of ours.

Kushner: What do you mean? [laughter] I arrived in London on Thursday night and turned on the news at my hotel to see if any of the referendum results had started to come in. And they started to come in around ten, but by eleven my eyes were … and I fell fast asleep. And somebody, one of the Tories, had just announced that it was going to be a very good day for Remain, and so I fell asleep feeling good and then woke up to horror.