I first experienced Brecht at college in the early 1990s during my A levels, and although I was a deeply political young person, I never drew the links between his theatre-making and the world I was living in. Brechtian practice seemed old, stale and irrelevant: a disassociated set of techniques that made for awful, earnest theatre which was awkward to perform and hard to watch. I didn't like it. In 2001 I began leading workshops for English Touring Theatre's ‘Practitioners Unplugged’ programme and through the process of devising and delivering practical workshops for young people I developed a brand new understanding and appreciation of Brecht.

As a theatre company Splendid makes episodic, dialectical theatre – inspired by the work of Bertolt Brecht – that ultimately encourages our audience to consider and question the world they are living in. As makers of political work, we are keen for the theories and techniques of Bertolt Brecht to be reclaimed by the next generation of theatre-makers and applied with confidence and freedom. Brecht himself insisted that the energy and strength of drama depended upon a continuous process of testing, discussion and revision.

When Splendid started in 2003 we consciously employed a Brechtian approach to our theatre-making. We were on a mission to engage a new generation of young people with social-political theatre whilst encouraging and empowering them to make their own. Epic theatre seemed like the obvious framework. It is thought-prodding, heartexposing, tightly structured, theatrical and deeply entertaining. It takes the obedient spectator and jolts them out of their passive state; it shouts: ‘Wake up and engage with the world!’ At its best it can ask big questions without dictating answers and can unearth the personal within the universal. At its heart Brechtian theatre is the theatre of and for change. As Peter Brook stated in The Empty Space (1968): ‘No one seriously concerned with the theatre can by-pass Brecht. Brecht is the key figure of our time, and all theatre work today at some point starts or returns to his statements and achievement.’The students’ ownership of Brechtian methodology is as politically significant as engaging them with the subject matter. Embodied knowledge is powerful and transformative. Unless theory is reclaimed, reinterpreted and made relevant it is a useless historical artefact.