Epic Theatre: Dramatising the Analysis

Abstract

We have examined in previous chapters how Bond’s experiments with dramatic form have resulted in an undermining of conventional responses to the theatrical medium and in a rejection of tragedy and its implications. In the first instance essentially classical and bourgeois theatre forms have been made to yield a powerful subversive potential; in the second a variation of tragicomedy has been effected which looks beyond the social, ethical and political iniquities of the present to a more optimistic future. These two contrasted styles are complementary in that they both challenge the status quo and demand new patterns of thought, more rational methods of organising society. There is a third area of Bond’s work which is more radical: it presents an even more savage picture of abuse and irrationality and in turn suggests more precise answers to the problems dramatised.

All art aspires to the lyrical, just as truth tends to the simple. And in epic the lyric becomes objective. The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance — and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It’s the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and the particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern.

The Activists Papers, p. 131.