Caryl Churchill
Theatre, politics and the voice of
women
Contemporary Literature in English
ELTE
Natália Pikli, PhD
English theatre after 1968
• After 1968: no censorship (abolition of the office of the Lord
Chamberlain – submitting plays to him before production began)
• changing the theatrical landscape – small theatres and groups in
late 1960s-early 1970s: ‘fringe’ theatre
– different approaches to drama – questioning the establishment
– political/gender issues and realism/biting satire
– experimentation – new forms of collaboration: The Joint Stock Company
(Max-Stafford Clark), Out of Joint
– small and independent theatrical venues (1968: cca 6 → late 1970s
over 100 in London)
– women as playwrights ("women can't do structure" ) – women as
theatre (Monstrous Regiment) – feminism: 1967: Abortion Act + partially
legalising homosexuality; 1970 Equal Pay Act propsed – 1975: a reality,
liberalisation of divorce
Subsidizing theatre: 1970s – public funding to small/inventive theatres too
↔ 1980s: Thatcherism: cuts! (Thatcherism = musicals, Cats, AndrewLloyd Webber – theatre as money-maker)
Caryl Churchill (born 1938)
” born
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in London, father political
cartoonist, mother actress/model
lived in Montreal
Oxford, read English
1960s: wife of a barrister, raising 3
small children AND writing radio
plays for BBC (1961-72)
1972: first major success – The
Owners, Royal Court Theatre
1974-75: playwright in residence
(Royal Court Theatre, first woman
playwright!)
1970s: The Monstrous Regiment;
Joint Stock Company
established, canonised – still
active and fresh
• The Royal Court Theatre: new playwrights,
testing field
• The Monstrous Regiment: 1970s feminism, allfemale theatre company; 1973, Ed Berman,
Almost Free Theatre – Women’s Theatre
Season
• The Joint Stock Company, Max Stafford Clark
(ironical name!) – workshops → writing the play
(communal/group AND individual
experience/effort; actors – field work,
improvisations led by the director, playwright
taking part – writing the play- rehearsals start) –
eg. Mad Forest, 1990 – with Ruminian students
– Cloud 9, Serious Money, Fen
Major Plays for the Theatre
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Owners (1972)
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976)
Vinegar Tom (1976)
Traps (1976)
Cloud Nine (1979)
Top Girls (1982)
Fen (1983)
Softcops (1984)
A Mouthful of Birds (1986)
Serious Money (1987)
Mad Forest (1990)
Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991)
The Skriker (1994)
Blue Heart (1997)
This is a Chair (1999)
Far Away (2000)
A Number (2002)
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006)
Seven Jewish Children — a play for Gaza (2009)
Love and Information (2012)
Inventions in subject matter and
form: postmodernism
• non-naturalistic technique
• women’s role, possibilities and position in
society
• The Owners (1972) – owning things and
persons (capitalism and gender problems) –
exploitation of others (politics and private lives)
• form: ‘always expect the unexpected’
• dialogues: carefully constructed (‘engineering’) –
with slashes/polyphonic dialogue; pauses are
more important than the words – ‘look behind’
• multimedial forms
17th-century English village
Vinegar Tom
(witches) & Brechtian songs
by Ducking Witches OverSEAS, 2015
„Evil women
Is that what you want?
Evil women
Is that what you want to see?
Evil women
on the movie screen
Evil women
of your own wet dream.”
VT by Ducking Witches –
themes/roles
- seducing girls, teenage mother, clever and independent, ’I hate my
body’ (Alice)
- old age, poverty, alcoholism, wife-beating (Joan)
- young isolated mother and wife, miscarriages, postnatal depression,
abortion (Susan)
- unwanted/forced marriage, hysteria treated by male doctors (Betty)
- ’cunning women’ female and independent intellectual scapegoating
(Margery)
- male impotance – blaming women, older man hittng on young ’fallen
girl’, physical violence as solution for everything (Jack)
- ‚witchfinders – the cold professional man (Packer) and the amatuer
enthusiast (Goody)
- Kramer & Sprenger: Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches)
(this production fused Betty and Susan’s roles)
political theatre?
• Caryl Churchill:
– ”whatever you do your point of view is going
to show somewhere. It usually only gets
noticed and called ‘political’ if it’s againts the
status quo”
•
a playwright’s duty is ”to ask questions”
• + thorough research (16th-17th-century
witchcraft, workshop method with
Monstrous Regiment)
Vinegar Tom – Gesamtkunst vs
alienation
• Margery: ”Good folk get
bewitched”; „Find something to
burn”
• Superstition, magic, charms
• ’safe position’ (wife, mother) vs
stigmatising and scapegoating
Song:
• If everybody worked as hard
as me… (”the country is what it
is beacuse, the family is what it
is because, the wife is what
she is to her man”)
structure – episodic
but narrative /
relatable characters
Margery’s role
drama
satyr play
’jig’
Cloud 9 (1979)
• two acts: two timelines
• 1880, Africa, model Victorian English family
(Clive, Betty ♂ , Edward ♀, Victoria /doll/+
Betty’s mother), colonialism (servant, Joshua
/white/ + explorer Harry Bagley), independent
widower Mrs Saunders (‘go away’)
• 1979 London – family members only age 25
years: Betty ♀, Victoria, Martin, Edward, Gerry,
Lin, Cathy (♂ 5 year-old daughter of Lin )
Cloud 9
– irony and grim humour
• title: ‘a feeling of extreme happiness or euphoria, feeling like you're
floating on air’, 12 clouds – 9th inhabited – place of heaven (Urban
Dictionary)
• stereotypical Victorian happy family (cf. the songs at the beginning):
underneath – unhappiness, frustration
• adultery (Clive-Mrs Saunders, Betty ♥ Harry), homosexual desire:
Ellen, Nurse ♥ Betty, with pedophilia: Edward ♥ Harry, END of Act
One: another forced ‘happy’ marriage: Ellen and Harry
• Cross-casting:
– Betty: stereotypical Victorian wife, trying to live up to the expectations of
(male) society, silent and obedient – played by a male actor
– homosexual Edward by an actress
– black servant by a white actor
– young daughter by a mute doll
HUMOUR AND CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING: gender and social
stereotypes highlighted and problematised
Cloud 9 – the present day
• SEX – after 1960s: liberation ≠ happiness
• female sexuality: to be feared in 1880 (dark,
mysterious force) – problematic even after
emancipation
• Martin/Victoria: unhappy marriage, Lin: Lesbian
desire for Victoria, Edward’s unfaithful and
callous male partner, Gerry, Cathy – a disturbing
presence for her mother, Betty leaving Clive =
insecurity, strange ‘living arrangements’ (Lin,
Victoria, Edward, Cathy)
Brechtian theatre – teach/alienation
• episodic rather than ‘plotwise’
• no ‘psychological realism’
• Brechtian songs (stereotypes, eg. Edward/Betty: ‘Boy’s
best friend is her mother’) – alienation effect + irony
• Cross-casting – no easy sympathy with the characters
on stage – the world is unsympathetic
• doublings – eg. Fen 22 roles by 6 players
• ‘scizophrenia’ – further explored in later plays (Lives of
the Great Poisoners – dancers/singers/actors – split
personality  The Skriker, A Number)
Top Girls (1982)
• First scene: Marlene, successful businesswoman of the age invites
a quintet of famous historical-legendary women to celebrate her
recent success at a restaurant:
– Isabella Bird (1831-1904) Victorian traveller between the ages of 40 and
70
– Lady Nijo (b. 1258) Japanese courtesan of the Emperor, later Buddhist
nun travelling on foot through Japan
– Pope Joan, disguised as a man, Pope between 854-856
– Dull Gret – Brueghel’s painting, leading a grotesque attack of women
against hell and devils
– Patient Griselda – a legendary figure of female patience and obedience
(Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer) – a peasant girl, Marquis marrying her if
promised full obedience, tested (children taken away, sent home,
arranging for a future marriage), finally rewarded
– MARLENE: ”We’ve all come a long way. To our courage and the way we
changed our lives and our extraordinary achievements.”
P. Bruegel, the Elder: Dulle Griet
(Mad Meg), c. 1652
Dulle Griet, Patient Griselda
Top Girls
• as their stories unfold: success came with a price: loneliness, pain,
suffering, killed or kidnapped or abandoned children, losses of loved
ones
• anachronism and humour/irony at several layers:
GRISELDA: I never eat pudding.
MARLENE: Griselda, I hope you’re not anorexic. We’re having pudding,
I am, and getting nice and fat.
GRISELDA: Oh if everyone is. I don’t mind.
• (self-)exploitation – Marlene: ‘the capitalist internalised’ – male
aggression, ruthlessness, choosing her career over her
daughter=pain
• sisters: Marlene (London, single, career woman) v Joyce (raising
M’s daughter, country, isolation, emotional deprivation – no real
alternatives
The Skriker (1994)
• a magical,
nightmarish fairy tale
+ contemporary
concerns (teenage
mothers, mental
institution, post-natal
psychosis and killing)
• longing to be loved:
symbol – The Skriker:
ancient witch/fairy
The Skriker
• fairy tale elements: good girl (Lily)- bad girl (Josie) – after
a kiss with the Skriker: gold/toads out of their mouths
• shape-shifting/gender-switching of the Skriker (beggar,
kid, man, etc.) – attractive and repellent
• wishes – be careful what you wish for! (Josie trying to
save Lily – going to the underworld)
• long monologues of the Skriker – eg. Prologue: an
invented language: pile of words, nonsensical, Joycean,
nursery rhymes, fragmented → obscure but palpable
meaning
• dialogue: Josie/Lily/Skriker
• mute characters – dancers (multimediality) – nightmarish
vision (see next slide: dinner in the dark underworld)
The Skriker
• love ≈ Skriker: if you love/accept her – she sticks
on you, unbearable, when she’s gone – you
miss her
• granting wishes – stealing/robbing love from
others
• Josie/Lily: rivals for the Skriker
• splitting of the identity (newborn-killing v careful
mother)
• finally: Lily sacrificing herself for her baby, Josie
and the Skriker – so as even she would not
remain unloved – Skriker in her full glory again
A Number (2002)
• Salter: a man in his early
sixties, he was married and
had one son. His wife killed
herself by throwing herself
under a tube train. A few years
later he had his son Bernard
cloned.
• Bernard (B2): His son, thirtyfive, first clone of his first son,
made to replace original son.
• Bernard (B1): His son, forty.
First son of Salter, Mother
committed suicide when he
was two years old.
• Michael Black: His son, thirtyfive. Another clone of Salter’s
first son. He is married with
three children, and is a
mathematics teacher.
A Number
• contemporary concerns/anxieties: cloning (Dolly the
sheep, a kitten, a man?) + age-old
philosophical/theatrical question: Who am I?
• father: facing past sins/facing the sons (sons never meet
on stage)
– an abandoned son
– moral problem of cloning
– cloning not only one but ‘a number’
• fragmented dialogue,unfinished sentences, interruptions
(no punctuation): nothing/too much to say –
spectators’/readers’ task – to make sense
• the world as they had know it, collapsed – their speech
‘summary’
• feminist? or a female viewpoint on the world: women are just as silly,
ruthless or frustrated as men
• leftist/ anti-capitalist? Or: against any economic/emotional
deprivation, writing on sexual/gender politics in general
• the world v the individual: politics in the private sphere
• didactic? Never – never only one viewpoint, never sentimental,
never demonizing
• Caryl Churchill: a playwright’s duty is ‘to ask questions’
HUNGARY: Vinegar Tom – in Átváltozások 19. 2000., Holdfény
(Európa, antológia, The Skriker – Hamvai Kornél), Caryl Churchill:
Drámák (Európa, 2007)
• Performances: The Skriker/Az Iglic – Vígszínház 2000, Börcsök E.,
Katona J. Színház-Bábszínház 2013; A Number/Sokan, Szöveg
Színház, 2006, Cloud 9, 2009 K.V. Társulat; Blue Heart/Kék szív,
2008 MU Színház
• Films: A Number, 2008, Top Girls BBC
In-yer-face theatre and the latest
generation of playwrights
• www.inyerface-theatre.com – young, violent and aggressive theatre
of the 1990s-2010s – esp. Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Jezz
Butterworth
• Series: Methuen Drama. Contemporary Dramatists = ‘canon’
• Mike Bartlett (homosexuality, middle class, everyday themes)
• Jezz Butterworth (Jerusalem; young, daring, black comedy)
• Sarah Kane (1971-99, 24:7, Blasted; psychology, brutal, suicide)
• David Harrowen (Blackbird) SZKÉNÉ
• Martin McDonagh (1970, inspired by Tarantino
and films, In Bruges/Erőszakik/, 7 psychopaths
- Irish but distance from Ireland –
- Synge-ean lge and
Tarantinoesque violence; Leenane-trilogy (1996-7)
The Beauty Queen of Leenane,
A Skull in Connemara, The Lonesome West
(now: ‘Vaknyugat’ Átrium Film-Színház)
The Cripple of Inishmaan, 1996 (A kripli)