Caryl Churchill Essay, Research Paper

Who is she and where did she come from? Caryl Churchill is one of England’s most

premier female, post-modern playwrights. She has strived throughout her career

as theatrical personality to make the world question roles, stereotypes and

issues that are dealt with everyday, like, violence, and political and sexual

oppression. She has been part of many facets of performance throughout her

almost sixty year career. Not only has she been a strong force on the stage, but

has also had strong influences with radio and television. She is truly a

talented woman dabbling in not only a Brechtian style of theatre that has been

commented on time and time again, but also musicals of a sort. Churchill was

born in London on September 3, 1938. She lived in England until the age of ten

when her family moved to Canada. There she attended Trafalgar School in Montreal

until 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 studying

English at Oxford she took an interest in theatre. She wrote her first three

plays while at the university. Where has she been? Radio plays When her career

in theatre and performance started at Oxford she began the first phase in her

career. 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 Wonderful

Time, 1959. All three of these plays, extremely focused on sound, propelled her

career into radio. For the next ten years she concentrated her energy solely on

radio plays, starting off with The Ants, which she, herself, "thought of it

as 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 her

career. "Most important, of course, was its openness to new playwrights. In

addition, it offered an unusual freedom in that it placed few limits on

length?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 for

her to take her art. She wrote a few stage plays during her radio stint, none of

them being produced. She re-wrote some of her radio plays and eight of them were

produced between the years of 1962 and 1973. She then moved on to television

plays. She became very unsatisfied with it very quickly, commenting that

Television?attracts me very much less?It has the attraction of a large

audiences and being the ordinary peoples’ medium and not being the sort of

effete cultural thing that no one ever pays any attention to anyway. But as an

actual medium, as a physical thing that happens, I don’t find it anything like

as exciting myself as the stage. I do like things that actually happen. (Kritzner

45). It was then time for her to make a change. Stage plays After a dozen years

of writing primarily for the radio, Churchill finally made her move to the

mainstage. She wrote Owners for Micheal Codron. The play was produced by the

Royal Court Theatre in 1972. Her career went uphill from there. She became

associated with a "sphere of the sometimes conflict-ridden but always

politically daring and artistically committed theatre often referred to simply

as ‘the Court’ (Kritzner 61). Churchill’s reputation became paired with the

Royal Court. She became the first female resident dramatist, and later help with

the Young Writer’s Group program. During her time at the Royal Court she wrote

many plays, still focusing a great deal on sound and voice. At the same time as

she held position of resident dramatist, she also worked at other theatres and

with other groups. She founded the Theatre Writers’ Group, now known as the

Theatre Writers Union, and had works produced by Joint Stock Theatre Group and

Monstrous Regiment. Historical plays During her previous playwriting time she

had been very centered in time around her present. Starting a new phase in her

career in the mid-1970’s, she began to look at history and place her plots in

appropriate time frames to make her objective, within each play, more vivid.

Paired with the Monstrous Regiment and Joint Stock, Churchill "multiplied

her ideas, intensified her energy, expanded the range of viewpoints she was able

to encompass, presented fresh avenues for theatrical experiment, and helped her

develop an integrated feminist-socialist critique of society" (Fitzsimmons

29). From this position she wrote many plays such as Vinegar Tom and Light

Shining in Buckinghamshire. During this time the Brechtian influences came out

full force. She went, in this time, full scale from emulating him to pointing

out 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 critical

revision" ( Kritzner 84). She also uses this movement of her career to

empower her audiences to take an active role in the play by reclaiming their own

history. The plays challenge not only the thoughts and practices of the past and

of her present, but also that the reputations of history be "regarded as

sealed records not amenable to change in the present. " (Kritzner 84).

Where was she? Sex and Gender The next move that Churchill made in her career

was to attack the ideas of gender in her society. This is the area she was in

while she wrote Cloud Nine. She discarded her previous focus of Brecht, but

still took some of the fundamental teachings with her. In an introduction to the

play, written by Churchill herself, she describes her thought process during the

writing of the play. "Originally I thought it would all be set in the

present like the second act; but the idea of colonialism as a parallel to sexual

oppression, which I first came across in Genet, had been briefly touched on in

the workshop. When I thought of the colonial setting the whole thing fell quite

quickly into place. Though no character is based on anyone in the company, the

play draws deeply on our experiences, and would not have been written without

the workshop" (Churchill viii). The use of cross gendering as well as

cross-culturalizing in the first act has completely changed our current ways of

production. This device is not used out of sheer conventionality, but out of

necessity for the characters and the impact of the plot. "By mismatching

the performers with their stage roles, Churchill underscores the artificiality

and conventionality of the characters’ sex roles. A clever theatrical idea thus

serves a dramatic purpose, and the sexual shenanigans that result give rise to

more than just the predictable cheap laughs" (Asahina 565). In this play we

see two very distinct acts, a style in which later in Churchill’s career she

will use incessantly. In one act we are in colonial Africa in 1880. Act two we

are 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 male

superiority, and hence to suppress female sexuality and homosexuality?.the

second half is merely a series of isolated portraits of more libertarian sexual

relationships in the 1970’s?" (Wandor 7). During the entire introduction

of the characters to the audience we hear an actual echo of the characters

trying to be what Clive wants. Joshua, the Black servant, says "What white

men want is what I want to be." Clive’s wife, Betty, states "I live

for 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 is

presented in the form of a song. This leads us to believe that these characters

never question their roles because they believe it and it is so ingrained within

them, that they could never think differently, especially with the strong force

of Clive present. In the second act the characters are also played by their

appropriate 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 the

thoughts of the audience. The characters, without Clive, in the second act try

to find out their own roles pertaining to themselves instead of dependent on a

White, male figure telling them who they are.. This play is steeped with

qualities and devices that help Churchill’s point ring with clarity. Where did

she go? Revisiting the Past After the acclaim of Cloud Nine Churchill made yet

another change to her style. She became focused on a broader range, dealing now

with social critique instead of the feminist-socialist approach of earlier in

her career. Her works during this phase, namely Top Girls, Fen, and Serious

Money, showed her revisiting past personal styles and revising them. It showed

her "extracting elements from both the epic and personal areas of theatre,

reshaping traditional devices, and melding all of these factors into a truly

original style" (Kritzner 138). These plays tend to have a lesser approach

of optimism than those previous in her career, but she continues to question the

set up of society. Revising Myth Revision of myth, as I have found, is a typical

element in most feminist writings. The analysis and re-analysis of the

construction of modern day thought is a device widely used. This was Churchill’s

next 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 main

reasons why women writers go towards the mythological side of life. " to be

taken seriously as a writer, to get at something very deep in herself, and to

release an imprisoned meaning not yet discovered in the previous versions of the

myth" (Kritzner 172). As far as many critics have found, this shows

Churchill’s renewal of interest in the combination of personal experience and

political analysis and the knowledge of there "inseparability of reason and

emotion" (Kritzner 172). Now Since her last known "movement"

Churchill is still writing plays and changing her style. She has written

musicals and many plays with two unrelated acts that somehow are intertwined.

She continues to question society with such works as Blue Heart, Hotel, and Hot

Fudge.

Asahina, Robert. The Hudson Review, XXXIV 1981. Churchill, Caryl. Cloud Nine.

Pluto Press, Ltd. London, 1979. Kritzner, Amelia Howe. The Plays of Caryl

Churchill. St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1991. Wandor, Michelene. "Free

Collective Bargaining", Time Out, 30. March-4 April 1979.