Epic, Tragic, Dramatic Theatre and the Brechtian Project

Abstract

This chapter questions the notion that Brecht’s Epic theatre is constructed solely in opposition to the Greek model of tragedy. In line with more recent and nuanced readings of the relationships between tragedy and epic, it presents Brecht’s attacks on what he perceived as Greek tragedy, through his well-documented mis-readings of Aristotelianism, as part of the modernist attempt to reclaim epic as a potentially radical form (Eisenstein), at once popular (oral, medieval etc) and modernist (montage, non-linear, stylised). Brecht’s project in this context is read as parallel to recent attempts to reclaim the epic tradition for performance. Through the work of Walter Benjamin on Brecht parallels are drawn between the Sage, the Rhapsode and the Epic Performer. Again, as throughout this book, Plato appears as a performance theorist rather than Aristotle. Through a fantastic dialogue between Brecht’s Epic Mothers and tragedy’s consummate mother, Medea, parallels are drawn between the tragic and the epic protagonist, and between the categories of tragic, epic, dramatic and post-dramatic theatre, creating a genealogy for the notion of post-dramatic theatre in Greek tragedy itself. These ideas come together in a close reading of another epic/tragic anti-mother, Antigone, in Brecht’s first of his famous models of epic theatre, The Antigone-Model.