A number caryl churchill

British playwright (born )

Caryl Lesley Churchill (born 3 September )^[1] is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes.^[2] Celebrated for works such as Cloud 9 (), Top Girls (), Serious Money (), Blue Heart (), Far Away (), and A Number (), she has been described as "one of Britain's greatest poets and innovators for the contemporary stage".^[3] In a dramatists' poll by The Village Voice, six out of the 20 polled writers listed Churchill as the greatest living playwright.^[4]

Early life and education

Churchill was born on 3 September in Finsbury, London, the daughter of Jan Brown, a fashion model and actress,^[5] and Robert Churchill, a political cartoonist.^[6] After the Second World War, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada; Churchill was ten years old.

In Montreal, she attended Trafalgar School for Girls.^[7]

She returned to England to attend university in ,^[5] and in graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, with a BA degree in English Literature.^[8] She received the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize at Oxford and also began her writing career there.

Her four earliest plays — Downstairs (produced ), You've No Need to be Frightened, Having a Wonderful Time (), and Easy Death (produced ) — were performed at Oxford by student theatre ensembles.^[9] Her play Downstairs was performed at the National Student Drama Festival in and won the first prize.

Work

While raising a family in the s and s, Churchill began to write short radio dramas for BBC Radio. These included The Ants (), Not, Not, Not, Not Enough Oxygen (), and Schreber's Nervous Illness (). She also wrote television plays for the BBC, including The After-Dinner Joke () and Crimes ().

These, as well as some of her radio plays, have been adapted for the stage.^[2]

In her early work, Churchill explored gender and sexuality through modernist theatre techniques of epic theatre. In the mids, she started to incorporate dance-theatre in her writing. A Mouthful of Birds () is the first example of this, and references the surrealist theatre tradition of Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty.

The fragmented and surrealistic narratives in Churchill's work characterise it as postmodernist.^[10]

Themes and plays

In , Churchill wrote Owners, a two-act, scene play about obsession with power. It was her first professionally produced stage play and "her first major theatrical endeavour"; it was produced in London the same year.^[2]

She served as resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre from to , and was the Royal Court's first female playwright in residence.^[11] She began collaboration with theatre companies such as the Joint Stock Theatre Company and the Monstrous Regiment Theatre Company (a feminist theatre collective).

Both used an extended workshop period in their development of new plays.^[12] Churchill continues to use an improvisational workshop period in developing a number of her plays. During this period, she also wrote Objections to Sex and Violence ().^[2]

Her first play to receive wide notice was Cloud Nine (), "a farce about sexual politics", set partly in a British overseas colony during the Victorian era.

It explores the effects of the colonialist/imperialist mindset on intimate personal relationships, and uses cross-gender casting for comic and instructive effect. The play became successful in Britain and in the United States, winning an Obie Award in for best play of the year in New York.^[2][13]

Churchill gradually abandoned more conventions of realism, with her loyalty to feminist themes and ideas becoming a guiding principle in her work.

She won an Obie Award for best play in with Top Girls, "which deals with women's losing their humanity in order to attain power in a male-dominated environment."^[2][14] It features an all-female cast, and focuses on Marlene, who has relinquished a home and family to achieve success in the world of business.

Half the action takes place at a celebratory dinner where Marlene mixes with historical, iconic and fictional women who have achieved great stature in a "man's world", but always at great cost. The other half of the play, set a year in the past, focuses on Marlene's family, where the true cost of her "successful" life becomes poignantly and frighteningly apparent.

In Top Girls, Churchill devised a system to indicate how the dialogue should be performed. She used the forward dash signal (/) to demonstrate a person interrupting the person speaking. She also used the asterisk symbol (*) to indicate a speech following on from a speech earlier than the one immediately before it.^[15]

Softcops (first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in ) is a "surreal play set in 19th-century France about government attempts to depoliticize illegal acts".^[2]Justin Hayford of the Chicago Reader wrote that the play had little to offer to those who had already read Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (on which Softcops is based), and that the play "glosses Foucault's monumental work in Cliffs Notes fashion".^[16] In , Michael Billington stated that Softcops "felt like a meditation on crime and punishment lacking Churchill's usual gift of narrative drive."^[17]

The play A Mouthful of Birds () was co-written with David Lan.

Wallace Shawn has argued that it is among the "rich, inventive" Churchill works that are responsible for theater remaining exciting in modern times.^[18] Cameron Woodhead of The Sydney Morning Herald billed the play as "a difficult pleasure to watch and a challenge to perform".^[19] Billington listed A Mouthful of Birds as one of Churchill's misfires, however, and dismissed the play as "mystifying in its attempt to create a dance-drama suggesting that the violence and ecstasy of Euripides' The Bacchae were alive in modern Britain."^[17]

Serious Money (), "a comedy about excesses in the financial world",^[2] is a verse play, chiefly written in rhyming couplets.

It takes a satirical look at the vagaries of the stock market and its Thatcherite denizens. The play was highly acclaimed, perhaps in part because it played immediately after the stock market crash of ^[2]Icecream (Royal Court Theatre ) explores Anglo-American stereotypes.^[2] Richard Christensen of the Chicago Tribune wrote that Icecream "doesn't have much depth, but it does have a quirky, creepy kick to it", describing it as "a small but telling piece of theater".^[20] Andrew Dickson of The New Yorker dubbed the play "wryly picaresque" in ^[21]

Churchill's play The Skriker () includes distorted language, references to English folktales, and evocations of modern urban life.

The Skriker is an ancient shape-shifting fairy and death portent in a search for revenge and love.^[22] The play initially received lukewarm reviews from critics, but is now considered among Churchill's successes.

"The prolific Churchill continued to push boundaries into the late s. In she collaborated with the composer Orlando Gough to create 'Hotel,' a choreographed opera or sung ballet set in a hotel room.

Also that year her surrealistic short play 'This Is a Chair' was produced."^[2] Reviews of the London opening of Hotel were favorable, but with the first piece ("Eight Rooms") generally considered superior to the second ("Two Nights").^[23] In , Moira Buffini of The Guardian listed This Is a Chair as one of Churchill's best works, stating that it "shows a real humility about the political inadequacy of playwrights."^[24]

Her play, A Number, addresses the subject of human cloning and questions of identity.

Churchill received an Obie Award in for this play.^[25] Her adapted screenplay of A Number was shown on BBC TV in September

The play Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? () takes a critical look at what she sees as Britain's submission to the United States in foreign policy.

In , Churchill was commissioned to write the libretto for a new short opera by Orlando Gough, as part of the Royal Opera House's ROH2 OperaShots initiative. The resulting work, A ring a lamp a thing, played for five performances in the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House.^[26]

Her play Love and Information opened at the Royal Court Theatre in September , directed by James Macdonald.

It was well-received by critics. The play, featuring characters and performed by a cast of 15, is structured as a series of more than 50 fragmented scenes, some no longer than 25 seconds, all of which are apparently unrelated but which accumulate into a startling mosaic, a portrayal of modern consciousness and the need for human intimacy, love and connection.

The play will have its regional premiere at Sheffield Theatres in June , directed by Caroline Steinbeis.

Ding Dong the Wicked () has been described as a companion piece to Love and Information. Charles Spencer said in The Telegraph that the work is "little more than a clever dramatic exercise" but "nags away in the memory long after you have left the theatre".^[27] Matthew Tucker gave the Royal Court Theatre performance three out of five stars, dubbed the play "snappy", and wrote, "Some may find this latest offering terse and obscure, however, in the spirit of explorative theatre, Ding Dong The Wicked is an intriguing and satisfying production."^[28] A reviewer for the Evening Standard argued: "What it all means is food for later reflection, but as always Churchill seems inventive, coolly socialist, bleak yet dazzling, a bit of a shaman.

Although her technique sounds gimmicky, it works."^[29] Conversely, The Guardian's Michael Billington wrote that the work "feels as if it's cramming a trunkload of ideas into a tiny vanity case [] the tightness of the format means there is no room to explore the source of so much private and public fury, or to differentiate between one society and another.

In short, the play is too generalised to make any strong emotional impact."^[30]

The Royal Court Theatre premiere of Pigs and Dogs received a positive review in The Stage^[31] and moderately positive reviews in The Guardian,^[32]The Observer,^[33] and Evening Standard,^[34] with the last newspaper's Henry Hitchings stating: "While the incantatory style isn't consistently engaging, this is a striking parade of views on a subject that merits more sustained treatment." Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out said in a three-star review that the play "makes its point effectively if tersely".^[35]Mark Lawson of The Guardian praised Beautiful Eyes as a "sharp" comedy.^[36]

Translations

Churchill has published translations of Seneca's Thyestes, Olivier Choinière's Bliss (Félicité),^[37] and August Strindberg's A Dream Play.

Her version of A Dream Play was premiered at the National Theatre in ^[38]

Retrospective

The Royal Court Theatre held a 70th-birthday retrospective of her work by presenting readings of many of her most famous plays directed by notable playwrights, including Martin Crimp and Mark Ravenhill.^[39][40]

Interest in Palestine

Main article: Seven Jewish Children

Churchill is a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.^[41]

In January , she wrote a ten-minute play that explores a history of Israel, ending with the Israeli attack on Gaza.

It was performed for free at the Royal Court Theatre, with a collection taken to donate to Medical Aid for Palestinians.^[42]

The Sunday Times condemned its "ludicrous and utterly predictable lack of even-handedness"; for The Times, "there are no heroes or villains, for all that Churchill decries what is happening in Gaza".^[42] Writers such as Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Melanie Phillips in her Spectator blog criticised the play as anti-Semitic,^[43][44] as did John Nathan.^[45] He noted that Churchill has said that Seven Jewish Children is "not just a theatre event but a political event."^[45] He suggested that a play representing views of one community and critical of that community needed to be written by a member of that community.^[45] The Royal Court denied the accusation.^[46][47]

Churchill published the play, Seven Jewish Children – a play about Gaza, online, for free download and use.

Churchill said: "Anyone can perform it without acquiring the rights, as long as they do a collection for people in Gaza at the end of it".^[42][48]

In April , Churchill was named the recipient of the European Drama award in recognition of her life's work. The prize was worth £65,, and was given by German theatre Schauspiel Stuttgart and sponsored by the Baden-Württemberg ministry of science, research and arts.

The award was cancelled following criticism of Churchill's support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a decision condemned by industry figures including Harriet Walter, Stephen Daldry, Peter Kosminsky and Dominic Cooke.^[49]

Personal life

She married campaigning barrister David Harter in (died ).^[50] They had three sons and she was last known to be living in the same house in Hackney, East London, that she's been living in since the early s.^[51]

List of works

Theatre

Radio dramas

• You've No Need to be Frightened ()
• The Ants ()
• Lovesick ()
• Identical Twins ()
• Abortive ()
• Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen ()
• Schreber's Nervous Illness () – based on Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber.
• Henry's Past ()
• The Judge's Wife ()
• Top Girls () - radio version of Churchill's play of the same name.
• Serious Money () - radio version of Churchill's play of the same name.
• The Skriker () - radio version of Churchill's play of the same name.
• Escaped Alone () - radio version of Churchill's play of the same name.

Television

• Save It for the Minister () – written with Mary O'Malley and Cherry Potter
• The After-Dinner Joke ()
• The Legion Hall Bombing ()
• Crimes ()
• Fugue () – created with Ian Spink
• Top Girls () – television adaptation of Churchill's stage play of the same name
• A Number () – television adaptation of Churchill's stage play of the same name

Awards and honours

Churchill has received the following awards:^[53]

In addition, the Caryl Churchill Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London in Egham was named in honour of Churchill in ^[55]

See also

References

Further reading

• Churchill, Caryl ().

  Seven Jewish Children. London: Nick Hern Books. Download only.

• Churchill, Caryl (). Churchill Plays: Four. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl (). Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl ().

• Caryl churchill themes
• Caryl churchill monologues
• A number by caryl churchill analysis
• Caryl churchill writing style

A Number. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;

• Churchill, Caryl (). Far Away. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl (). This Is a Chair. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl (). Churchill Plays: Three. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl (). Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.

  London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;

• Churchill, Caryl (). The Skriker. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl (). Mad Forest. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl (). Churchill: Shorts. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl ().

  Cloud Nine. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;

• Churchill, Caryl (). Icecream. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl (). Traps. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl (). Blue Heart. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;
• Churchill, Caryl, and Gough, Orlando (). Hotel.

  London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN&#;

External links