TITLE:
Brechtian Epic Elements in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls
AUTHORS:
Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari, Telli Beiraghi
KEYWORDS:
Mimesis, Epic Theatre, Anti-Illusive, Alienation Effect
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.3 No.2,
February
22,
2016
ABSTRACT: Since Aristotle’s response to Plato’s attack on poetic imitation as being
twice removed from reality, the concept of mimesis has pervaded the drama.
Aristotle’s all arts, epic, tragic, comic and dithyrambic, regardless of their
different media, subject matter, and manner of imitation, involve mimesis.
Aristotle argued that mimesis provided fictional distance from the things being
presented on stage, and allowed the audience to get emotionally involved
leading them to catharsis, the purgation of emotions. In the midnineteenth
century, mimetic representation became the core of the drama in a movement
known as realism which presenting an illusion of reality by concentrating on
human behavior, accurate settings, and natural speech. In the twentieth century,
playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht started to oppose mimetic representation
because they believed that it encouraged spectators to accept and conform to
the dominant social conventions. In this article, the researcher traces
Brechtian epic elements in Top Girls, Churchill’s most acclaimed play, and examines the
aspects in which she follows and/or deviates from Brecht. In this sense, the
researcher explains some of Brecht’s epic devices and then applies them to
Churchill’s Top Girls.