Caryl ChurchillWho is she and where did she come from? Caryl Churchill is one of England’s mostpremier female, post-modern playwrights. She has strived throughout her careeras theatrical personality to make the world question roles, stereotypes andissues that are dealt with everyday, like, violence, and political and sexualoppression.
She has been part of many facets of performance throughout heralmost sixty year career. Not only has she been a strong force on the stage, buthas also had strong influences with radio and television. She is truly atalented woman dabbling in not only a Brechtian style of theatre that has beencommented on time and time again, but also musicals of a sort. Churchill wasborn in London on September 3, 1938.
She lived in England until the age of tenwhen her family moved to Canada. There she attended Trafalgar School in Montrealuntil 1955. At this time she moved back to England to attend Lady Margaret Hall,Oxford University. This is the key place that her career began.
While studyingEnglish at Oxford she took an interest in theatre. She wrote her first threeplays while at the university. Where has she been? Radio plays When her careerin theatre and performance started at Oxford she began the first phase in hercareer. She was very focused on sounds and voice. Her first three plays,Downstairs, 1958; You’ve No Need to be Frightened, 1959; and Having a WonderfulTime, 1959.
All three of these plays, extremely focused on sound, propelled hercareer into radio. For the next ten years she concentrated her energy solely onradio plays, starting off with The Ants, which she, herself, “thought of itas a TV play, but my agent Margaret Ramsey sensibly sent it to radio”(Kritzner16). This focal point gave her many advantages in this time in hercareer. “Most important, of course, was its openness to new playwrights. Inaddition, it offered an unusual freedom in that it placed few limits onlength.
. . Finally, radio had already proved its potential for serious drama”(Kritzner 16). During the time of her writing for the theatre and her”sounds phase,” she was looking outward, investigating new places forher to take her art. She wrote a few stage plays during her radio stint, none ofthem being produced.
She re-wrote some of her radio plays and eight of them wereproduced between the years of 1962 and 1973. She then moved on to televisionplays. She became very unsatisfied with it very quickly, commenting thatTelevision. . . attracts me very much less.
. . It has the attraction of a largeaudiences and being the ordinary peoples’ medium and not being the sort ofeffete cultural thing that no one ever pays any attention to anyway. But as anactual medium, as a physical thing that happens, I don’t find it anything likeas exciting myself as the stage. I do like things that actually happen. (Kritzner45).
It was then time for her to make a change. Stage plays After a dozen yearsof writing primarily for the radio, Churchill finally made her move to themainstage. She wrote Owners for Micheal Codron. The play was produced by theRoyal Court Theatre in 1972. Her career went uphill from there. She becameassociated with a “sphere of the sometimes conflict-ridden but alwayspolitically daring and artistically committed theatre often referred to simplyas ‘the Court’ (Kritzner 61).
Churchill’s reputation became paired with theRoyal Court. She became the first female resident dramatist, and later help withthe Young Writer’s Group program. During her time at the Royal Court she wrotemany plays, still focusing a great deal on sound and voice. At the same time asshe held position of resident dramatist, she also worked at other theatres andwith other groups. She founded the Theatre Writers’ Group, now known as theTheatre Writers Union, and had works produced by Joint Stock Theatre Group andMonstrous Regiment.
Historical plays During her previous playwriting time shehad been very centered in time around her present. Starting a new phase in hercareer in the mid-1970’s, she began to look at history and place her plots inappropriate time frames to make her objective, within each play, more vivid. Paired with the Monstrous Regiment and Joint Stock, Churchill “multipliedher ideas, intensified her energy, expanded the range of viewpoints she was ableto encompass, presented fresh avenues for theatrical experiment, and helped herdevelop an integrated feminist-socialist critique of society” (Fitzsimmons29). From this position she wrote many plays such as Vinegar Tom and LightShining in Buckinghamshire.
During this time the Brechtian influences came outfull force. She went, in this time, full scale from emulating him to pointingout bold differences between herself and the heavily influential force of Brecht. Her historical plays did not only show an overview of the set period but”subjected traditional versions of the historical phenomenon to criticalrevision” ( Kritzner 84). She also uses this movement of her career toempower her audiences to take an active role in the play by reclaiming their ownhistory. The plays challenge not only the thoughts and practices of the past andof her present, but also that the reputations of history be “regarded assealed records not amenable to change in the present. ” (Kritzner 84).
Where was she’sex and Gender The next move that Churchill made in her careerwas to attack the ideas of gender in her society. This is the area she was inwhile she wrote Cloud Nine. She discarded her previous focus of Brecht, butstill took some of the fundamental teachings with her. In an introduction to theplay, written by Churchill herself, she describes her thought process during thewriting of the play. “Originally I thought it would all be set in thepresent like the second act; but the idea of colonialism as a parallel to sexualoppression, which I first came across in Genet, had been briefly touched on inthe workshop.
When I thought of the colonial setting the whole thing fell quitequickly into place. Though no character is based on anyone in the company, theplay draws deeply on our experiences, and would not have been written withoutthe workshop” (Churchill viii). The use of cross gendering as well ascross-culturalizing in the first act has completely changed our current ways ofproduction. This device is not used out of sheer conventionality, but out ofnecessity for the characters and the impact of the plot.
“By mismatchingthe performers with their stage roles, Churchill underscores the artificialityand conventionality of the characters’ sex roles. A clever theatrical idea thusserves a dramatic purpose, and the sexual shenanigans that result give rise tomore than just the predictable cheap laughs” (Asahina 565). In this play wesee two very distinct acts, a style in which later in Churchill’s career shewill use incessantly. In one act we are in colonial Africa in 1880. Act two weare in London in 1980, but for the characters, they have only aged 25 years. “The ideology of the Victorian family is shown to interweave class and malesuperiority, and hence to suppress female sexuality and homosexuality.
. . . thesecond half is merely a series of isolated portraits of more libertarian sexualrelationships in the 1970’s.
. . ” (Wandor 7). During the entire introductionof the characters to the audience we hear an actual echo of the characterstrying to be what Clive wants. Joshua, the Black servant, says “What whitemen want is what I want to be. ” Clive’s wife, Betty, states “I livefor Clive.
The whole aim of my life is to be what he looks for in a wife. “Other characters resonate the same. The actual introduction of the characters ispresented in the form of a song. This leads us to believe that these charactersnever question their roles because they believe it and it is so ingrained withinthem, that they could never think differently, especially with the strong forceof Clive present. In the second act the characters are also played by theirappropriate sex with the exception of Lin’s 5-year-old daughter played by a man.
Once again it takes the role of a dramatic device to further the action and thethoughts of the audience. The characters, without Clive, in the second act tryto find out their own roles pertaining to themselves instead of dependent on aWhite, male figure telling them who they are. . This play is steeped withqualities and devices that help Churchill’s point ring with clarity. Where didshe go? Revisiting the Past After the acclaim of Cloud Nine Churchill made yetanother change to her style.
She became focused on a broader range, dealing nowwith social critique instead of the feminist-socialist approach of earlier inher career. Her works during this phase, namely Top Girls, Fen, and SeriousMoney, showed her revisiting past personal styles and revising them. It showedher “extracting elements from both the epic and personal areas of theatre,reshaping traditional devices, and melding all of these factors into a trulyoriginal style” (Kritzner 138). These plays tend to have a lesser approachof optimism than those previous in her career, but she continues to question theset up of society. Revising Myth Revision of myth, as I have found, is a typicalelement in most feminist writings. The analysis and re-analysis of theconstruction of modern day thought is a device widely used.
This was Churchill’snext implement. She wrote A Mouthful of Birds and Ice Cream under this style. Alicia Ostriker, a writer of mythical poetry, wrote that there are three mainreasons why women writers go towards the mythological side of life. ” to betaken seriously as a writer, to get at something very deep in herself, and torelease an imprisoned meaning not yet discovered in the previous versions of themyth” (Kritzner 172). As far as many critics have found, this showsChurchill’s renewal of interest in the combination of personal experience andpolitical analysis and the knowledge of there “inseparability of reason andemotion” (Kritzner 172). Now Since her last known “movement”Churchill is still writing plays and changing her style.
She has writtenmusicals and many plays with two unrelated acts that somehow are intertwined. She continues to question society with such works as Blue Heart, Hotel, and HotFudge. BibliographyAsahina, Robert. The Hudson Review, XXXIV 1981.
Churchill, Caryl. Cloud Nine. Pluto Press, Ltd. London, 1979.
Kritzner, Amelia Howe. The Plays of CarylChurchill. St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1991.
Wandor, Michelene. “FreeCollective Bargaining”, Time Out, 30. March-4 April 1979.
