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This chapter takes up the question of how an individual event, such as a recognition scene, functions with respect to the operatic plot as a whole. It explores the notion of plot in critical works ranging from Aristotle's Poetics to Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot, and differentiates plot from plotting. Plot in Aristotle's definition is static, “the structure of the events”, while plotting, according to Brooks, is active — the dynamic process that propels the work forward. The chapter illustrates the interaction of recognition and “operatic plotting” with a detailed consideration of the multiple plot of Le nozze di Figaro. Attention is given to prominent moments of recognition, including the dénouement in the Act IV finale. The last section of this chapter is devoted to comments about plot dramaturgy in Mozart's letters.

Realistic tendencies in fiction and art are relatively easy to document and describe. Architecture, however, is another matter. A building design is of necessity a compromise among utilitarian needs, engineering imperatives, financial constraints, and aesthetic values. However difficult it is to assess buildings as works of art, the fact remains that people during the 19th century frequently discussed architecture in relation to larger cultural trends, including the rise of realism. Chicago served as the seedbed for a new “commercial school” of architecture with its Chicago school after the Civil War. Chicago's feverish materialism and entrepreneurial energy attracted swarms of new residents and drew international attention. During this time, John Wellborn Root emerged as one of the most innovative leaders in architecture. Two of his most important Chicago buildings were the Montauk Block and the Monadnock Block, commissioned by Peter Brooks. Louis Sullivan celebrated the virile accomplishments of corporate capitalism and implemented his dictum “form follows function.”

This chapter continues the discussion of Japanese gothic by examining various works of Arishima Takeo, a contemporary of both Kyöka and Tanizaki. Arishima's distinctive style has long been recognized as possessing elements of melodramatic excess, which also marks gothic fiction. The chapter seeks to deepen understanding of what Arishima was trying to achieve with this heightened mode of writing and attempts to link his style to the themes of his works, which, like much gothic writing, possess a political dimension critical of imperial Japan. The chapter examines various aspects of Arishima's “foreignizing” style, using the notion of the “melodramatic imagination” as developed by Peter Brooks in his 1976 book of the same name.

In the generation after Artaud, many directors attempted to put the maxims of Cruelty into practice. These included Jean-Louis Barrault, who applied Artaud’s ideas to a 1942 production of Racine’s Phèdre. Whereas Artaud had eschewed formal speech, Barrault returned to Racine’s poetry with a new sense of its musicality. His protégé Jorge Lavelli did the same with a translation of Seneca’s Medea some twenty years later. At the same time, Peter Brook was applying the principles of Cruelty to Seneca’s Oedipus. But while Seneca was experiencing something of a revival in the theatre industry, academic consensus (still under the sway of Schlegel) was of the opinion that Seneca’s plays could not be staged. The most prominent exponent of this position was Otto Zwierlein in Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas, whose detailed analysis of Seneca’s ‘flaws’ as a dramatist was predicated entirely on outdated assumptions of stage naturalism.

This chapter relates Ian’s experiences in Paris assisting Peter Brooks’ company. Brook had been exploring a theatrical piece L’Homme Qui, based on Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, including a “Disembodied Lady,” with a condition similar to Ian. Their usual technique was to act from the “inside out,” using their own experiences to develop a character. But here they had no experience of the impairment and so were trying to move from the “outside in.” David Bennent, who was to play the person deprived of proprioception, found it too difficult, and when they heard about Ian they invited him to Paris to assist. Ian was delighted to help, and to be under the gaze of a group of artists for a change. The final piece was very well received and was later performed at the National Theatre, London as The Man Who.

The final chapter considers various aspects of Ian’s condition and his views on some of the scientific and artistic activities with which he has been involved. He explains how he is more consciously embodied than disembodied, why he agreed to lose his anonymity to become involved in a biography, and how, though he appreciates science designed to confirm or refute a hypothesis, he prefers the on-the-fly informed curiosity behind other experiments. He talks of his awareness of the need to be available in a lab and yet keep a distance to perform experiments to his best ability. Ian reflects on meeting Peter Brook and his involvement in Valley of Astonishment 20 years after L’Homme Qui. Ian’s continuing vulnerability is revealed in a short narrative about what happened when the lights went out one night, while he considers the effects of aging when meeting a similarly affected subject.

Peter Brook’s ‘epic’ Mahabharata was not overtly a play for here and now but a conscious attempt to absorb the epics of elsewhere and render them meaningful throughout the world; it reached beyond place and time and sought a theatre of fundamental shared human character, belonging to no particular land or people or epoch. In pure form, we could see here all the essential elements of ‘epic’ theatre—narrative, episodic structure, music, the large-scale workings of gods and men and the crucial objective eye on all actions; and the result was something entirely original and intoxicating. It is the combination of ‘intimate’ impact with ‘epic’ scale, which marks the difference between truly ‘epic’ theatre and the mere big spectacle. This chapter examines the work of various practitioners from around the world, as well as some of the author’s own practice, in its attempt to define theatre on ‘an epic scale’.

This opening chapter explores what identifying ‘epic’ in performance entails. This is essential given Brecht’s avowedly anti-Aristotelian ‘Epic Theatre’, which is for the most part very far from what the editors and most of the contributors to this volume understand by ‘epic performances’. This general introduction also examines what an ‘epic’ source means—in broad terms a long narrative hexameter poem, composed in either Greek or Latin—and will explore exactly how mediated that source can be before it ceases to be an ancient ‘epic’ source. It also begins to ask how one might account for the recent ‘epic turn’ in performance. It ends with a discussion of certain recurrent formal elements in the epic performances under discussion in the volume and concludes that there are more overlaps with Brecht’s ‘Epic Theatre’ than might have initially been imagined.