For playwrights or theatre practitioners to have their names turned into adjectives is a somewhat dubious accolade that is rarely accorded: in the last hundred years we have acquired Chekhovian, Shavian, Stanislavskian, Artaudian, even Beckettian and Pinteresque, but not Reinhardtian, Piscatorian, Brookian or Genetesque. But the one adjective that lifts most easily off the tongue, the one that sounds least like an Armenian exile, is undoubtedly 'Brechtian'. Alone among Germans (except for the somewhat arcane 'Schillerian'), Brecht enjoys, both as writer and director, a privilege which can be misleading and misappropriated: 'Brechtian' can legitimise; it can also limit; it can certainly distort.

Writing in the 'Sacred Cows' series, published in The Sunday Times Magazine in 1977, Sheridan Morley complained: