Narrative Over Plot in Top Girls and Life of Galileo Savannah McClendon College

German playwright Bertolt Brecht developed his theory of epic theatre as a response to the renaissance of Aristotelian tragic theatre in the latter part of the 1920s (Hecht, 40). Where Aristotle allowed the audience of his theatre the purgation of their emotions through dramatic scenes arousing catharsis, Brecht dared his audience not to weep or fume, but to become bothered by the offending subject: utterly, lastingly, and to the point of action. The focus of Brechtian theatre then became not the play’s story or plot, with its many Romantic devices of poetics and intense feeling, but the much more purposeful and straightforward narrative (“Brecht on Theatre”, 37). The preference of narrative over plot manifests itself in the work of a wide range of plays spanning the decades between epic theatre’s inception and the present day. This is clearly demonstrated in Brecht’s own 1943 play Life of Galileo, as well as British playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1982 play Top Girls. Though the two pieces were written nearly forty years apart, their emphasis on narrative over plot has remained largely the same.

Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo is exactly what it proclaims itself to be: the life of Galileo. It reads like a biography, with...