Brechtian Epic Elements in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls

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.