ABSTRACT
Plays are parables, which have an educative purpose. Brecht’s play Mother Courage and her Children tells of the struggle of ordinary people to survive despite adversity, and his The Life of Galileo, of the struggle of scepticism and reason against faith and power. The stuff of plays is story-telling; they tell stories and have plots, in which are contained the themes the playwright wishes to explore. The plot imposing on events a pattern that in real life would tend to be casual and haphazard shapes them into a story that has a degree of coherence.
