Performing Epic or Telling Tales

From spoken word performance poetry to twenty-first century Happenings, ancient Greek and Roman epics regularly provide both the subject matter and the form for emergent and seasoned theatre makers. Performing Epic or Telling Tales is concerned less with the ‘what’ of this epic turn than the ‘why’; and explains this turn to epic form and content with reference not only to the translation and scholarly histories of the epics but also to earlier performance traditions and, notably, to recent theoretical debates relating to text-based ‘drama’ and performance based ‘theatre’.