The Plays Of Caryl Churchill

Includes a revival of her best-known play, "Cloud Nine" and a new translation, "Bliss".

First Published in 1985.

This study focuses on themes and techniques of empowerment in the full range of produced plays by Caryl Churchill from 1960 to the present. The playwright is well known for combining theatrical inventiveness with uncompromising social critique. She is one of the very few contemporary women playwrights to have achieved international prominence, and she has done so on the basis of a forthright socialist-feminist stand.

Although now celebrated as a world-leading playwright, Caryl Churchill has received little attention for her socialism, which has been frequently overlooked in favour of emphasising gendered identities and postmodernist themes. Churchill’s Socialism examines eight of Churchill’s plays with reference to socialist theories and political movements. This well-researched and dynamic new book reframes Churchill’s work, positioning her plays within socialist discourses, and producing persuasive political readings of her drama that reflect much more of the political challenge that the plays pose. It additionally explores her uneasy relationship with postmodernism, which presents itself particularly in Churchill’s later plays. The book contains a very helpful chapter on socialist contexts, which outlines some of the key events, debates, and movements during the late 1960s up until the early 2000s. This chapter also offers an incisive critique of the easy acceptance by some socialists of a postmodernist rejection of grand narratives and political agency. An in depth examination of the rarely explored interconnections of utopianism and theatre, forms another chapter, where all eight of Churchill’s plays, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Mad Forest, The Skriker, and Far Away, are introduced. The plays are then discussed in pairs in a further four chapters with reference to communist historiography, the class/gender intersection, the end-of-history thesis, ecocritical challenges and postmodernism.

The Theatre of Caryl Churchill documents and analyses the major plays and productions of one of Britain's greatest and most innovative playwrights. Drawing on hundreds of never-before-seen archival sources from the US and the UK, it provides an essential guide to Churchill's groundbreaking work for students and theatregoers. Each chapter illuminates connections across plays and explores major scripts alongside unpublished and unfinished projects. Each considers the rehearsal room, the stage, and the printed text. Each demonstrates how Churchill has pushed the boundaries of dramatic aesthetics while posing urgent political and theoretical questions. But since each maps Churchill's work in a different way, each deploys a different reading practice - for many approaches are necessary to characterise such a restlessly imaginative and prolific career. Through its five interlocking parts, The Theatre of Caryl Churchill tells a story about the playwright, her work, and its place in contemporary drama.

Cloud nine: Relationshiops-- between women and men, men and men, women and women. It is about sex, work, mothers, Africa, power, children, grandmothers, politics, money, Queen Victoria, and sex.

Caryl Churchill's 'Three More Sleepless Nights' is a play about romantic relationships turning sour. It was first staged at the Soho Poly, London, on 9 June 1980.

Val, Shirley, Nell, Alice and Angela work in Mrs Hassett's gang. Frank works on Mr Tewson's farm. Val leaves her family for Frank. A love story with moguls and boggarts. 'Fen' has been created through the Joint Stock method, with the writer working closely with the director and actors over a long period of workshops and rehearsals.