Who is caryl churchill

Caryl Churchill lives in London. Rarely in modern British drama has the combination been so fruitful. Her play-writing career began in radio in the s, encompasses numerous acclaimed stage plays, and from the s, has moved more and more into a mixed theatre of text, dance, and music.

In other words, Churchill has traversed the dramatic spectrum, from word and sound alone in her radio plays, to a greater and greater emphasis on space and movement in her more recent work. What themes, then, run across this tremendously varied oeuvre? Churchill's dramaturgy is above all the staging of desire, and more particularly the desires of those members of society who are least able to realise them.

These desires are sometimes erotic, they are almost always political. They are desires which social and political structures are unwilling to accommodate - the desires of the oppressed, and most often, of women. The drama is in the thwarting of desire, the betrayal, in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire , of the utopian hopes of the Ranters and Levellers by the Cromwellian party during the English Civil War and, in Mad Forest , the similar sense of incomplete revolution after the overthrow of the Romanian dictator Ceausescu in The longing for a different relation between the sexes is expressed with some optimism in Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine , but with less assuredness in Top Girls and Fen Always with Churchill there is the sense that exorbitant, utopian desires must be explored, but at the same time a recognition of the obstacles they come up against.

Perhaps as a result of this frustration, many of her plays stage a near frenzy of anti-social passion: A Mouthful of Birds , inspired by Euripides' Bacchae , takes as its theme possession by spirits; Serious Money , commercially and critically one of Churchill's most successful plays, satirises the ferociously Bacchanalian behaviour of stockbrokers and City traders; Lives of the Great Poisoners charts in song and dance the murderous paths of four prisoners from different epochs; and the title character in The Skriker is a sort of wish-granting demon who alternately satisfies and torments two teenage girls.

Churchill is often thought of as a playwright who writes on historical themes, but among her stage plays this is only really the case for a series of pieces produced between the mids and mids. The sequence begins with Vinegar Tom and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire , two plays set in seventeenth-century England, but with resonances with the present. Making extensive use of documentary material, both plays tackle historical subjects that have a high profile in the popular imagination of history - the persecution of witches and the English Civil War - and both challenge popular perceptions of these events.

Just as in Arthur Miller's The Crucible , the persecution of witches in Vinegar Tom is seen as a convenient displacement of other social issues.

Unlike Miller's version, which paints women as treacherous accusers, Churchill's feminist revision emphasises how so-called witches were punished precisely because they were women: women 'on the edges of society, old, poor, single, sexually unconventional'. A play about the effects that competing in a hypermasculine professional world can have on working women, it famously opens with a dinner party attended by notable women from across history.

This method of punctuation is now used throughout the playwriting world. It should be abundantly clear by now that Churchill is not like most playwrights. Although both Cloud Nine and Top Girls received worldwide success and became studied classics of postmodern drama, and her play Serious Money was a West End hit and even played Broadway, the playwright continued to follow her own interests. Unlike some of her famous contemporaries, she has never written for film or television, or completed a novel.

She also stopped giving interviews during the s, preferring to let each new play of hers speak for itself with no further explanation from its author.

The play features just two actors, five scenes, and no important design requirements. It would appear to be a simple story about a father and a son. It is a controversial play that deals with sexual politics and has some female characters played by men to In its first run at the Royal Court, the cast included Gwen Taylor Remember me. Mark Kurlansky. Samantha Shannon. Sign in Create an account. Sub-total excluding delivery. Shop in.

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