Caryl Lesley Churchill (born 3 September 1938)[1] is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes.
[2] Celebrated for works such as Cloud 9 (1979), Top Girls (1982), Serious Money (1987), Blue Heart (1997), Far Away (2000), and A Number (2002), she has been described as "one of Britain's greatest poets and innovators for the contemporary stage".
[7] She returned to England to attend university in 1956,[5] and in 1960 graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, with a BA degree in English Literature.
[2] Her first play to receive wide notice was Cloud Nine (1979), "a farce about sexual politics", set partly in a British overseas colony during the Victorian era.
She won an Obie Award for best play in 1983 with Top Girls, "which deals with women's losing their humanity in order to attain power in a male-dominated environment.
The other half of the play, set a year in the past, focuses on Marlene's family, where the true cost of her "successful" life becomes poignantly and frighteningly apparent.
[15] Softcops (first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984) is a "surreal play set in 19th-century France about government attempts to depoliticize illegal acts".
[16] In 2018, Michael Billington stated that Softcops "felt like a meditation on crime and punishment lacking Churchill's usual gift of narrative drive.
Wallace Shawn has argued that it is among the "rich, inventive" Churchill works that are responsible for theater remaining exciting in modern times.
[19] Billington listed A Mouthful of Birds as one of Churchill's misfires, however, and dismissed the play as "mystifying in its attempt to create a dance-drama suggesting that the violence and ecstasy of Euripides' The Bacchae were alive in modern Britain.
[2] Richard Christensen of the Chicago Tribune wrote that Icecream "doesn't have much depth, but it does have a quirky, creepy kick to it", describing it as "a small but telling piece of theater".
[21] Churchill's play The Skriker (1994) includes distorted language, references to English folktales, and evocations of modern urban life.
[23] In 2015, Moira Buffini of The Guardian listed This Is a Chair as one of Churchill's best works, stating that it "shows a real humility about the political inadequacy of playwrights.
The play, featuring 100 characters and performed by a cast of 15, is structured as a series of more than 50 fragmented scenes, some no longer than 25 seconds, all of which are apparently unrelated but which accumulate into a startling mosaic, a portrayal of modern consciousness and the need for human intimacy, love and connection.
"[28] A reviewer for the Evening Standard argued: "What it all means is food for later reflection, but as always Churchill seems inventive, coolly socialist, bleak yet dazzling, a bit of a shaman.
"[29] Conversely, The Guardian's Michael Billington wrote that the work "feels as if it's cramming a trunkload of ideas into a tiny vanity case [...] the tightness of the format means there is no room to explore the source of so much private and public fury, or to differentiate between one society and another.
"[30] The Royal Court Theatre premiere of Pigs and Dogs received a positive review in The Stage[31] and moderately positive reviews in The Guardian,[32] The Observer,[33] and Evening Standard,[34] with the last newspaper's Henry Hitchings stating: "While the incantatory style isn't consistently engaging, this is a striking parade of views on a subject that merits more sustained treatment."
[38] The Royal Court Theatre held a 70th-birthday retrospective of her work by presenting readings of many of her most famous plays directed by notable playwrights, including Martin Crimp and Mark Ravenhill.
The award was cancelled following criticism of Churchill's support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a decision condemned by industry figures including Harriet Walter, Stephen Daldry, Peter Kosminsky and Dominic Cooke.