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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|25 pages
Life and Politics
part 2|56 pages
Early Plays and Collaborations, the 1960s–1970s
part 3|23 pages
Thatcherism, the New Right and the 1980s
part 4|48 pages
Revolution and Cross-Artform Experiments, 1990–2000
part 5|28 pages
Churchill in the Twenty-First Century