thought they might be useful.^41 I’ll begin with the ‘epic drama’.To
begin with, recall that the terms‘epic’and‘dramatic’describe, for the
Greeks, two different styles of poetry: hence Plato’s discussion of what
makes dramatic (especially tragic) poetry distinctive, compared with epic.
Epic poetry combinesmimesis (roughly: imitation) with narration; dra-
matic poetry has no narration; it is puremimesis. The epic is thus a story
that is reported to its audience by a storyteller (or perhaps to its reader).
The storyteller (or rhapsode)–the performer or reciter of the epic–isn’t
meant to be confused with the characters whose adventures he reports on,
although he may do impressions of them at various points. But in dra-
matic poetry–and, by extension, in what Brecht terms the‘Aristotelian
drama’–the actors are not‘telling’the story: theyarethe story. Thus, the
actor playing Hamlet isn’t best described as ‘telling you the story of
Hamlet’; that would imply a kind of separation between actor and char-
acter that, according to Plato’s discussion, isn’t possible.^42 For the pur-
poses of the performance, the actor playing Hamlet just is Hamlet. The
notion of an‘epic drama’, then, is meant to sound contradictory atfirst
glance, because one is supposed to think that the defining characteristic
of a drama is such that it can’t be an epic. This desired jarring effect
has, of course, been lost–especially to modern, English-speaking students;
but, once restored, we can see that it is a helpful term.^43 Brecht’s pro-
ductions are meant to put together these opposed modes of storytelling:
he’s doing drama as if it were an epic. Thus, actors both‘are’the char-
acters and also‘report’on the characters as if in the third person (as would
the rhapsode, telling the story of Odysseus). As Brecht puts it:‘the actor
must not only sing but show a man singing’.^44
Brecht doesn’t want to abandon the dramatic mode altogether, so it’s
not that he just prefers the epic mode. Otherwise he would have written
epics–which he didn’t. On the contrary, he obviously thought that the
dramatic elements were valuable, as long as they were combined with
the epic elements in the appropriate ways. Seen this way, conventional theatre
and epic theatre are not mutually exclusive modes of presentation: there is a
spectrum running from the purely dramatic mode of presentation (char-
acter and actor are inseparable; no sense of third-person storytelling) to
the purely epic mode, in which there is no dramatic action whatsoever.
Brecht was keen to point out that his plays could use different techniques
within this spectrum in different scenes, depending on what he felt was
required.
In one of his most helpful essays on this subject, Brecht likens the
techniques he is using to the techniques used by the eyewitnesses of a
street accident, who are trying to explain what happened to some new-
comers to the scene.^45 He suggests that his own theatre is much closer to
the street scene than to conventional, Aristotelian theatre. The eyewitnesses
182 From the Stage to the World