ABSTRACT

One of Europe's greatest playwrights, Caryl Churchill has been internationally celebrated for four decades. She has exploded the narrow definitions of political theatre to write consistently hard-edged and innovative work. Always unpredictable in her stage experiments, her plays have stretched the relationships between form and content, actor and spectator to their limits.

This new critical introduction to Churchill examines her political agendas, her collaborations with other practitioners, and looks at specific production histories of her plays. Churchill's work continues to have profound resonances with her audiences and this book explores her preoccupation with representing such phenomena as capitalism, genocide, environmental issues, identity, psychiatry and mental illness, parenting, violence and terrorism. It includes new interviews with actors and directors of her work, and gathers together source material from her wide-ranging career.

part 1|25 pages

Life and Politics

chapter 1|23 pages

Contexts

part 2|56 pages

Early Plays and Collaborations, the 1960s–1970s

chapter 2|12 pages

Transformations: The Long 1960s

chapter 3|28 pages

Stage Work in the 1970s

chapter 4|14 pages

Key Production: Cloud Nine

part 3|23 pages

Thatcherism, the New Right and the 1980s

chapter 5|21 pages

Key Production: Top Girls

part 4|48 pages

Revolution and Cross-Artform Experiments, 1990–2000

chapter 6|24 pages

Key Production: Mad Forest

chapter 7|22 pages

Cross-Artform Collaborations and Far Away

part 5|28 pages

Churchill in the Twenty-First Century

chapter 8|22 pages

Key Production: A Number

chapter 9|4 pages

Afterword