In “Short Organum for the Theatre” Brecht stated that by using V-effect he intended to “free socially conditioned phenomena from that stamp of familiarity which protests them against our grasp today” by a defamiliarizing representation “which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (, p. This was put forward by the alienation devices. He continues that the most important similarity between Churchill and Brecht is their artistic intention of empowering the audience “against oppression” rather than encouraging “serene acceptance of an apparently inevitable fate” (ibid).īrecht’s epic theatre aimed at provoking social change by enabling the audience to see social conditions they have taken for granted with a new gaze. According to Kritzer, like Brecht, Churchill avoids “the Aristotelian evocation of pity and fear in favor of stimulating new understandings of specific social situations through ‘astonishment and wonder’” (, p. In producing her unconventional techniques of representation, Churchill has followed and expanded on Brechtian epic devices. As a result, the audience was allowed to think rationally about the events which happened on stage and to reconsider the social conditions which they had taken for granted.Ĭaryl Churchill is an example of a British woman-playwright, who has also been concerned with the form of drama, experimenting with different structures and shapes to convey her ideas. By using anti-illusive devices known as alienation effects, which included special scenic, technical and acting methods, the epic theatre created a distance between the audience and the action on stage, and prevented the spectators from getting emotionally involved in the story line. Since the Berliner Ensemble’s first visit to England in 1956, Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre has had a strong influence on many playwrights.
Researcher explains some of Brecht’s epic devices and then applies them toĪs a twentieth-century German playwright, Bertolt Brecht broke away with the traditional way of representation which was based on Aristotle’s ideas and introduced his own theory known as the epic theatre. In this article, the researcher tracesīrechtian epic elements in Top Girls, Churchill’s most acclaimed play, and examines theĪspects in which she follows and/or deviates from Brecht. Playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht started to oppose mimetic representationīecause they believed that it encouraged spectators to accept and conform to Human behavior, accurate settings, and natural speech. Known as realism which presenting an illusion of reality by concentrating on In the midnineteenthĬentury, mimetic representation became the core of the drama in a movement Leading them to catharsis, the purgation of emotions. Presented on stage, and allowed the audience to get emotionally involved Twice removed from reality, the concept of mimesis has pervaded the drama.Īristotle’s all arts, epic, tragic, comic and dithyrambic, regardless of theirĭifferent media, subject matter, and manner of imitation, involve mimesis.Īristotle argued that mimesis provided fictional distance from the things being Since Aristotle’s response to Plato’s attack on poetic imitation as being
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