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Epic Drama

A term popularized by Bertolt Brecht (though invented by Erwin Piscator) to describe a style of theatrical storytelling that, for political reasons, pits itself against the conventional rules of dramaturgy as outlined by Aristotle, who distinguished "epic" from "dramatic" writing. Whereas traditional drama is supposed to make audiences empathize with the struggle of a single, psychologically self-contained protagonist, epic drama places characters against the backdrop of the largest possible historical and political context in order that their actions do not seem inevitable or determined by private "human nature," but instead are revealed as part of a public, man-made, and therefore alterable set of historical facts. To prevent spectators from lapsing into an unthinking emotional stupor, epic theatre uses short, episodic, self-contained scenes, multi-media projections, written text, and music to interrupt and "alienate" the action rather than to emphasize its emotions. See "alienation effect," epic poetry, and dialectic argument.

Epic Poetry

A form of oral verse, originally sung from memory to musical accompaniment by specialist bards, containing a vast panorama of human life in war and peace. The epics of ancient Greece, each tens of thousands of lines long, are known to us mainly through the works of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The stories of humans and gods contained in such poems provided most of the narrative material of Athenian tragedy and the satyr play.

Epilogue

A short, topical, often comic poem appended the end of a play and delivered directly to the audience by a popular actor.

Episodic Plot

A play or literary work composed of a series of separate and to some degree interchangeable incidents (rather than of a single, unified, and continuously unfolding narrative) is said to have an episodic plot.

Existentialism

A kind of philosophy in which the meaning of human life is derived from the actual experience of the living individual. First detectable in the anti-systematic thinking of Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century, existentialism came to be associated with the playwrights, novelists, and philosophers of post-World-War-Two France (especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus). The existential worldview, in which life is assumed to have no essential or pre-existing meanings other than those we personally choose to endow it with, can produce an absurdist sensibility (see absurdism).

Expressionism

An influential art movement of the early twentieth century, c.1907–1920s (see modernism). Associated with Germany, it was strongly visual in orientation; indeed, some of its pioneers in drama were visual artists (Kandinsky, Kokoschka). It aimed to give external expression to internal psychological states, usually of an extreme, nightmarish, or otherwise violent kind. Expressionist characters are often tormented by a hostile, overly mechanized, dehumanizing urban environment. Their paranoid or fearsome inner visions are represented visually on stage through distorted perspectives and uncanny colours, menacing lighting, unrealistic and exaggerated costumes, and confusing discontinuities of time and space. Expressionist plays can have a tendency to allegory.