Frequently described as the first dramatist of the 21st century and the most consistently innovative playwright of the postwar era, Caryl Churchill is one of the most significant political dramatists in Western theatre. The majority of academics have privileged a history of male playwrights over female in twentieth-century British theatre history, which standard academic texts reflect. While Churchill has displayed a linguistic range that includes hyper-real dialogue, voices from different historic periods, satiric verse, song lyrics, Joycean streams of consciousness and punning, as well as the evocatively poetic, she is also famously spare with her dialogue, many of her works indicating a profound fascination with the limitation of words and the eloquence of silence. Churchill's plays have repeatedly interrogated parent's relationships with their children, and have been markedly invested in reflecting on motherhood and the ways in which mothers are devalued, and politically and socially scapegoated.