Arts & International Affairs: Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2018 | Page 33

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
and too much distance can end up in complete alienation (otherness). And these tropes
have generated aesthetic forms of reception, forms of reception that also come with a
political dimension. We as readers are transformed into spectators, watching a tragedy
enacted, indeed one whose themes would also be addressed in an actual tragedy performed
in Athens in the same year as the catastrophe of Melos, Euripides’ Trojan Women.
Our experience of reading is transformed into a performative event.
So the parallels that Brecht examines between lessons in acting and lessons in political
economy are not coincidental. In a sense, the most democratic politician would occupy
the gestus of the Brechtian actor or the Athenian hupocrites, where being and demonstrating
are not conflated and the performance of politics is always aware of its own performativity
(and accordingly the least democratic actor/politician like Brecht’s Arturo
Ui would be one who is trying to convince us that they are sincere, “real”). Brecht wrote
the play in dark times, when there was much at stake in the political ramifications of
theatricality. In our own times, when the term performativity is sometimes used ahistorically
and apolitically, it is perhaps equally important to stress that it comes with a long
and distinguished genealogy of both form and content. 5 And to repeat a much quoted
aphorism from that play, these matters have an added urgency today, as “the bitch that
bore him is in heat again.”
Olga Taxidou is Professor of Drama and Performance Studies at the University
of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the interactions between modernism
and classicism, especially in the theatre arts. She is the Series Editor
of The Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama, and Performance,
and her books include: The Mask: a Periodical Performance by
Edward Gordon Craig (1998); Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning
(2004); Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (2007). She is
co-editor (with V. Kolocotroni) of Modernism: an Anthology of Sources
and Documents (2000) and its sister volume, The Edinburgh Dictionary
of Modernism (2018). She also works on adaptations of classical Greek
Tragedies, the most recent of which, Medea, was produced in New York
(March 2018) by Mabou Mines Theatre Company, directed by Lee Breuer.
References
Artaud, Antonin. (1976) Selected Writings, ed. and intro. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen
Weaver. Berkeley: University of California Press.
5 For a broader discussion, see Butler and Athanasiou (2013). Interestingly, this book is presented in the
form of a dialogue between the two authors.
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