Telling Tales on Stage

Abstract

Abstract While Hans-Thies Lehmann dated the postdramatic turn in performance to the 1970s, Christian Biet and Christophe Triau have argued that, on the contrary, it is a seventeenth-century construct. ‘Drama’, they argue, was fashioned in the rule books of neoclassical theorists, who sought to elevate French tragedy in order to distinguish it from both its forebears and from other (less ‘serious’) contemporary performance arts. Chapter 2 examines the divisions between theatre and narrative that have come to dominate performance thinking since the closing decades of the twentieth century. The longstanding theoretical interplay between narrative and theatre has often been agonistically cast as epic versus drama, but this is a false dichotomy, erected by neoclassical theory and practice and promulgated most successfully by Schiller and Goethe; it does not stem from Aristotle’s Poetics, where drama is pronounced to possess ‘epic’ qualities. But for Brecht, ‘dramatized epic’ is precisely what he strove to re-make in his ‘Epic Theatre’. This, in Peter Szondi’s view, was a result of a ‘crisis’ in dramatic form around 1900, when Aristotelean teleological form and its dialogic structure no longer sufficed—and it is Szondi’s privileging of Brechtian epic, and Brecht’s challenge to the perceived and longstanding opposition of epic and drama, that lies behind Lehmann’s postdramatic theatre. Yet theory, it seems, is out of step with practice because narrative and ‘stories’ appear to matter in the theatre in ways that Lehmann’s schema doesn’t allow, notwithstanding his often overlooked speculation that a ‘new narrative theatre’ may follow the postdramatic one.