Literature · Playwrights
born 1938 · British
Political and feminist theatre; radical formal experiment
Caryl Churchill is widely regarded as the most inventive British playwright of the last fifty years. Working repeatedly with the Royal Court, and in the 1970s with the collaborative companies Joint Stock and Monstrous Regiment, she has written about capitalism, gender, cloning, climate and empire in forms that change with every play: cross-gender casting, overlapping dialogue, verse, ten-minute fragments. She gives almost no interviews and lets the plays speak.
A restaurant dinner party at which a woman celebrating her promotion is joined by five women out of history and painting, all talking over each other (1982)
Top Girls — the guests include Pope Joan, Lady Nijo and Patient Griselda; Marlene has left her daughter behind.
Act One in colonial Africa with men playing women and white actors playing black; Act Two in 1979 London, only twenty-five years later for the characters (1979)
Cloud Nine — written with Joint Stock; the cross-casting is the argument.
A verse comedy of the deregulated City of London, shouted across dealing-room telephones (1987)
Serious Money — written in rhyming couplets; it transferred to the West End and won the Olivier Award for Best Play.
A father is confronted, one after another, by the sons he had made from a single boy (2002)
A Number — a short two-hander about cloning, first played by Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig.
A girl discovers what is in her uncle's shed, then makes extravagant hats for a parade of prisoners, in a world where the weather and the animals have taken sides in the war (2000)
Far Away — forty minutes, three scenes, total war.
Four women in their seventies drink tea in a back garden while one of them delivers monologues of global catastrophe (2016)
Escaped Alone — written for Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham and June Watson.
A ten-minute play for unnamed voices about what adults tell a child, written in days and released royalty-free for Gaza collections (2009)
Seven Jewish Children — furiously debated; performed free worldwide.
Levellers, Ranters and Diggers argue about property and the imminent end of the world during the English Civil War (1976)
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire — devised with Joint Stock from Puritan pamphlets.