Perceiving the Worlds of Caryl Churchill Top Girls and Fatḥīyah El ʻAssāl Without Masks in Relation to Dramatic and Cinematic Techniques

Discussing her play Top Girls, Churchill explains to Renate Klett in "Anything's Possible in the Theatre" that theatre can create illogical connections: "If you want to bring characters from the past onto the stage then you can do it, without having to find a realistic justification" (19). Both Churchill in Top Girls and El-Assal in Without Masks bring a number of women from different social classes and historical backgrounds together on stage narrating their experiences, with the aim of questioning "the relationship between the past and current social practice" (Morelli 154). Hence, Churchill's and El-Assal's dramatic technique changes the purpose of narration from mere entertainment into that of perception. To the best of my knowledge, previous studies analyzed the two plays from a feminist perspective; therefore, this paper will adopt the semiotic approach to explore the significance of the narrative technique used by both dramatists to foster the audience/reader sense of perception rather than mere entertainment, through the employment of Brecht's V-effect. To achieve this aim, the proposed study will explore the following dramatic elements: the violation of temporal and spatial dimensions, and the employment of verbal and non-verbal techniques.