Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill is a prominent English playwright known for her politically charged and innovative theatrical works. Born in London in 1938, she moved to Canada with her family before returning to England, where she studied at Oxford University. Churchill's early career included radio plays that explored themes of personal and societal discontent. Her first major stage play, *Owners* (1972), established her reputation and introduced recurring themes such as gender roles and capitalist critique.
Churchill's most notable works include *Cloud Nine* and *Top Girls*, which examine colonialism, gender bias, and the struggles of women in various societal contexts. Throughout her career, she has experimented with form and structure, using techniques such as montage and character doubling. Additionally, her play *Seven Jewish Children* sparked significant debate, highlighting her willingness to address contentious topics.
In more recent years, plays like *Escaped Alone* and *Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp.* have continued to showcase her unique voice and perspective on contemporary issues. Churchill's works often blend feminist and socialist themes, challenging audiences to reconsider traditional narratives and societal norms.
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Subject Terms
Caryl Churchill
Playwright
- Born: September 3, 1938
- Place of Birth: London, England
ENGLISH PLAYWRIGHT
Biography
Caryl Churchill has gained an international reputation for politically charged and technically original plays. Churchill was born in London in 1938, the only child of Robert Churchill, a political cartoonist, and Jan Churchill, a model. In 1948, her family moved to Montreal, Canada, where she attended Trafalgar School. Returning to England, she earned a B.A. in English from Oxford University. While at Oxford, she produced her play Downstairs in 1958. She had other student productions, among them Easy Death in 1962.
During the 1960s, Churchill had a career as a radio playwright. Her radio plays, which reflect her depression, dissatisfaction with family life, and a series of miscarriages, are about the destruction of bourgeois middle-class life.
In 1972, Churchill wrote Owners, her first stage play to be produced professionally. Owners was produced by the Royal Court Theatre and won acclaim for Churchill as a promising new playwright. Owners explore two of Churchill’s constant themes: gender distinctions and capitalist greed. Marion, a real-estate entrepreneur, represents the active, achieving form of Christianity, and Alec, the man she wants to possess, represents Eastern passivity. As well as exploring the gender role reversal between the aggressive woman and the passive man, the play juxtaposes the realistic and the grotesque in throwing new light on conventional attitudes about individualism and capitalism.
In 1974, Churchill took a six-month hiatus, traveling to Africa and Dartmoor (in southwestern England). Churchill returned with the play Objections to Sex and Violence, produced on the main stage of the Royal Court in 1975. The unsuccessful play questions rationales for the use of violence and explores the relationship between sex and violence.
In the mid-1970s, Churchill aligned herself with two experimental theater groups, Monstrous Regiment and Joint Stock Company. Both companies started with concepts or subjects that they investigated through reading and group theatrical workshops in their approach to producing drama. Then, the playwright wrote a play based on the concept and the group work. Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, produced in 1976, shows the English Civil War of 1642–1651 from the viewpoint of groups searching for an egalitarian society and a new millennium; they are betrayed by Parliament, which favors the propertied class and the new capitalist state. Churchill experimented with a montage approach, combining short scenes with hymns and sermons. She used actors playing multiple characters and had the same character played by different actors. Using similar approaches, Vinegar Tom, produced in 1976, shows how the witch hunts of the seventeenth century scapegoated women who were different.
In 1979, the Royal Court produced Cloud Nine, which was produced in New York in 1981 and established Churchill as a playwright of note on both sides of the Atlantic. In Cloud Nine, Churchill links colonialism and gender bias. Act 1 takes place in the Victorian era in an African colony and creates a series of sexual stereotypes that unravel the hypocritical structure of Victorian society. Act 2 takes place a century later, but the characters have only aged twenty-five years. They find themselves caught between bewildering choices in an age of sexual liberation. In Cloud Nine, a man plays a woman, a woman plays a male child, and a white man plays a black man, reversing gender and racial distinctions.
Churchill’s next major play, Top Girls, was highly acclaimed in London and New York in 1982. The play shows how Marlene, attempting to climb the corporate ladder, abandons her slow-witted daughter, who has no hope for success. The action includes a dinner party where Marlene meets women from history and literature, and it reverses time sequences. Whereas Top Girls depicts betrayal by successful women, Fen, produced in 1983, investigates women at the bottom of the social spectrum and shows the fortitude of farm women who survive exploitation through ghosts and dreamlike sequences. In 1987, Serious Money depicted financial trading and back-room deals involving corporate takeovers. Written in rhyming verse that combines financial jargon with street vulgarity, this zany play satirizes the world of high finance and a capitalist society based on greed.
In Mad Forest, produced in 1990, Churchill explores the problems of a socialist country by depicting the Romanian revolution through the lives of two families. It combines documentary and surreal elements, bringing in angels and vampires. Skriker (1993) follows the adventures of a female spirit who transforms herself through a series of guises. The play combines music, dance, and cryptic language into a dreamlike spectacle. Churchill’s dramas combine socialist and feminist themes in an experimental theater that shatters the realms of time and space, examines the shifting transformations of character, and creates a spectacle that shocks the audience into a new awareness.
Blue Heart, published in 1997 and produced in 1999, comprises two of Churchill’s absurdist one-act “anti-plays” intended to be shown as doubleheaders. In the first one-act, Heart’s Desire, a married couple and the husband’s sister await their daughter's return from Australia. The play’s narrative progresses for a while before Churchill stops the action and replays it with variations. In the second one-act, Blue Kettle, the dialogue is increasingly replaced by the words blue and kettle until it makes no sense.
Churchill’s other works include Far Away (2000), A Number (2002), Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006) in the 2000s, Love and Information (2012), Ding Dong the Wicked (2013), and Here We Go (2015) in the 2010s. Her short play, Seven Jewish Children—A Play for Gaza (2009), caused controversy, with some critics decrying the play as inflammatory, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic, while others found it moving and thought-provoking. Churchill made the play available for free online, stipulating that the play be performed for free and that donations to Medical Aid for Palestinians be collected at the end of each performance.
In 2016, Churchill released Escaped Alone, which features a female perspective of environmental disasters, gossip, and politics. Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. (2019) is a series of plays that premiered together, though they are each unique. Critics and the public received both pieces well. Churchill also wrote a short play entitled What If If Only in 2021.
Bibliography
Adiseshiah, Sian. Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020.
Aston, Elaine, and Elin Diamond. The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Aston, Elaine. Caryl Churchill. Liverpool University Press, 2010.
Billington, Michael. "Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. Review – Caryl Churchill's Compelling Quartet." Guardian, 26 Sept. 2019, www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/sep/26/glass-kill-bluebeard-imp-review-finding-fascination-in-bloodshot-fables. Accessed 20 July 2024.
Billington, Michael. “Here We Go Review—Caryl Churchill’s Chilling Reminder of Our Mortality. Rev. of Here We Go, by Caryl Churchill." Guardian, 29 Nov. 2015, www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/nov/29/here-we-go-review-a-chilling-reminder-of-our-own-mortality. Accessed 20 July 2024.
Churchill, Caryl. “Read Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children.” Guardian, 26 Feb. 2009, www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/feb/26/caryl-churchill-seven-jewish-children-play-gaza. Accessed 20 July 2024.
Cousin, Geraldine. Churchill, the Playwright. London: Methuen, 1989.
De Angelis, April. “Caryl Churchill: The Changing Language of Theatre.” Guardian, 7 Sept. 2012, www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/sep/07/caryl-churchill-landmark-theatre. Accessed 20 July 2024.
Fitzsimmons, Linda, comp. File on Churchill. Methuen, 2014.
Kieburzinka, Christine Olga. Intertextual Loops in Modern Drama. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001.
Lawson, Mark. "What If If Only Review – Short and Sharp, With Shades of Scrooge." Guardian, 1 Oct. 2021, www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/oct/01/what-if-if-only-review-short-and-sharp-with-shades-of-scrooge. Accessed 20 July 2024.
Luckhurst, Mary. Caryl Churchill. Routledge, 2014.
Randall, Phyllis, ed. Caryl Churchill: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1989.