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Socialist and Feminist Perspectives in Caryl Churchill’s Dramaturgy
Lector dr. Diana PRESADĂ
Universitatea Petrol-Gaze din Ploieşti
Since her emergence onto the international theatre scene with Cloud Nine in 1979, Caryl
Churchill has challenged the bourgeois ideology within theatre. The main objective of this paper is
to illustrate the best of her provocative plays.
Acknowledged as a leading playwright for more than thirty years, Caryl Churchill has
consolidated her position in contemporary drama by combining a wide range of social issues with
theatrical experimentation. Alongside Pam Gems, Mary O’Malley and Michelene Wander, she has
given feminist theatre considerable prominence, accomplishing what the noteworthy women
playwrights such as Shelagh Delaney and Anne Jellicoe initiated in the late fifties. As she has
promoted feminist performance theory and dramatized women’s experiences, feminist critics have
acclaimed Churchill as a prestigious representative of the new theatrical trend.
Caryl Churchill commenced her remarkable career while studying English at Oxford
University. Her first three plays, Downstairs (1958), You’ve No Need to be Frightened (1959), and
Having a Wonderful Time (1959) date from that promising beginning. Soon afterwards, she focused
her creative urge on radio plays, including The Ants (1962), Not, Not, Not, Not Enough Oxygen
(1971) and Schreber’s Nervous Illness (1972). Special mention should be made of The Ants, where
a single metaphor provides the main theme which stands for human relationships. The emphasis
laid on the insignificance of the human being in a cruel and indifferent world also sets the tone for
her later work. The Churchillian short play proved to be artistically fruitful because the coordinates
of her dramaturgy were established during the radio phase. The concern with “bourgeois middleclass life and the destruction of it”, as she has put it, the conflict between the individual and mass
society, as well as the great leaps in time and space, can be traced back to that period of
effervescent creation.
Churchill’s reputation as a playwright rests on her stage plays. Her first full length drama,
Owners, was premièred at the Royal Court Theatre in 1972 and brought her wide recognition. The
play is both a coruscating farce and a bleak representation of capitalist society. Here she eminently
resorts to Orton’s overt manner of satirizing anti-social behaviour in order to lash out against the
unscrupulous materialism which degrades human nature. At the same time, the comic treatment of
the concept of ownership echoes her socialist views. Although the characters’ attitude to ownership
is the most incriminated evil in the play, Churchill also takes great delight in ridiculing conventional
gender roles by inverting the traditional pattern. Consequently, women are more active than men
and become the stigmatized symbol of mercantilism. For instance, the male protagonist of the play,
Clegg, is dominated by his selfish wife, Marion, who would stoop to anything to carry out her
devilish plans, including the murder of the man she has seduced. Her petrified heartlessness is
apparent in the following confession:
I’m not sorry at all, Alec… I never knew I could do a thing like that. I might be capable of
anything. I’m just beginning to find out what’s possible. Finding rapacious behaviour
intolerable, the playwright takes a critical look at the characters’ desire to own everything:
things, people and human relationships. Clegg’s own words illustrate the distorted values
that capitalist society holds: She is mine. I have invested heavily in Marion and don’t intend
to lose any part of my profit….
In spite of the fact that at first Caryl Churchill was not a politically committed dramatist,
between the 1970s and 1980s she took up writing for left-wing and feminist companies, such as
Joint Stock and Monstrous Regiment. It was during this period that she wrote several of her best
plays, like Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976), Vinegar Tom (1976) Cloud Nine (1979), and
A Mouthful of Birds (1986).
Both Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Vinegar Tom are set in seventeenth-century
England and tackle resonant historical subjects that challenge the reputation of history itself. In the
first mentioned play the dramatization of the English Civil War offers the pretext for discussing
human rights and the principles of democracy starting from the so-called radicalism of those ‘left of
Parliament’ who, in actual fact, were the ones who failed in their political ideal. The equality that
the Ranters and the Levellers demanded will become the keynote of Churchill’s entire work.
Documentary material of the period (the Putney debates, pamphlets by the Diggers and Levellers)
intermingles with fragments from the Old Testament and fictional dialogues providing a glimpse
into a revolutionary epoch which, from a socialist viewpoint, meant the beginning of social doubt –
the factor that set the process of change in motion. Churchill’s debate about the past lacks
McGrath’s comic counterpoints, as in the scene A Butcher Talks to his Customers, where her
austere rhetoric bears the stamp of Swift’s bitter tone. With Vinegar Tom Caryl Churchill redefines
history from a feminist angle. The play is dedicated to the Lancashire witch hunting in 1612 and
just as in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the persecution of the witches is comparable with the
practices of the present. But whilst the American playwright hints at McCarthy’s methods and his
anticommunist campaign condemning society’s inability to distinguish between good and evil,
Churchill is chiefly interested in denouncing a male world which regards women as inferior beings.
Furthermore, Miller portrays women as mischief-makers and treacherous accusers, whereas the
British dramatist shows them as victims pointing out the fact that, being single, poor and sexually
unconventional, they were punished only because they did not follow in the pattern society laid
down for them. The alienation effect (Vinegar Tom is a play with songs) maintains the suspense so
that the spectators should draw an ironic moral from the action. Neither Light Shining nor Vinegar
Tom revolves around a central protagonist because Churchill aims at analysing the repercussions of
events on groups of people. There are points of similarity between these dramas and Fen, a play that
provides a deep scrutiny into the miserable lives of a large number of women working in agriculture
in a low marshy area of East Anglia called the Fens.
The following historical plays, Cloud Nine and Top Girls, deal with current social-political
problems and sexual stereotypes conveyed through anachronistic theatrical devices. The Wildean
farce, Cloud Nine (1978), represents a lively and witty comedy of manners against the background
of British imperialism. Set in Victorian Africa and contemporary England, the play draws an
analogy between colonial and sexual oppression. Clive, a self-praising clerk of the British Colonial
Office, bullies his family and the natives into accepting his own ideas of moral values. Like in
Vinegar Tom, Churchill displays an astonishing command of the comic resources by using racial
and cross-gender casting. Consequently, Clive’s wife, Betty, who undervalues herself as a woman,
is performed by a man, the black servant, Joshua, who despises himself for being black, is played
by a white man, his adolescent effeminate son, Edward, who loves playing with his sister Victoria
and her dolls, is played by a woman, and so on. The comedy of hypocrisy is at its best in the first
act that depicts Clive’s efforts to maintain his concept of order in the world around him. The use of
cliché in the beginning excerpt from Act I serves as moral metaphor for fake human relationships:
Clive: This is my family. Though far from home, we serve the Queen wherever we may roam. I am
a father to the natives here, and father to my family so dear.
He presents Betty. She is played by a man.
My wife is all I dream a wife should be, and everything she is she owes to me.
Betty: I live for Clive. The whole aim of my life is to be what he looks for in a wife. I am a
man’s creation as you see, and what men want is what I want to be.
Clive presents Joshua. He is played by a white.
Clive: My boy’s a jewel. Really has the knack. You’d hardly notice that the fellow’s black.
Joshua: My skin is black but my soul is white. I hate my tribe. My master is my light. I only
live for him. As you can see, what white men want is what I want to be.
Clive presents Edward. He is played by a woman.
Clive: My son is young. I’m doing all I can to teach him to grow up to be a man.
Edward: What father wants I’d dearly like to be. I find it rather hard as you can see.
Indeed, the ludicrous treatment of the characters’ cliché-ridden speech reinforces the
dramatist’s attack on Victorian values. The high principles that Clive haughtily proclaims are
obviously denied by his chauvinistic and misogynic attitudes which transform him into the concrete
embodiment of perverted morality. Besides, the cross-sexual casting, which points to the characters’
ambiguous identities, hollows out the notion of respectability. If the first act provides an insight into
a male dominated world, in the second act, which is laid in London in 1979, the women and the
homosexuals gain ground in accordance with the changing sexuality of the epoch. Churchill rejects
the traditional function of theatre and the standard dramatic forms, preferring Joe Orton’s exuberant
farcical techniques that reveal sex obsession humorously. As fixed sexual norms have been
abolished, the characters have to rethink their identity in terms of homosexuality or bisexuality.
Unlike Cloud Nine, the comparison between history and the present in Top Girls (1982) draws our
attention to the fact that there are no significant changes as regards the position of women in
society. The equality of women to men seems to be an illusion within the existing economic system
which turns women into ‘surrogate men’ if they hanker for power in a man’s world. Five famous
heroines from different ages gather together at a dinner party to celebrate the promotion of their
modern counterpart, Marlene, the new managing director of ‘Top Girls’ employment agency. Half
the action takes place at a London restaurant (suggestively named Prima Donna), where Marlene
will be involved with the tales of achievement of these prominent figures: Isabella Bird, the
Victorian explorer, Lady Nijo, the mediaeval courtesan of a Japanese emperor, Pope Joan, the
travestied female pope, Dull Gret, a figure taken from a Bruegel painting, and Patient Griselda, the
symbol of the obedient wife praised by Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer. Yet, as their stories
unfold, the significance of the celebrated moment is undermined by the startling disclosures of the
sacrifices that all these women have made in their struggle for success. Ironically contradicting the
title, their accounts reveal an endless repetition of awful experiences: rapes, frustrations, oppression
and subservience to men. The list of the unconventional historical plays can be completed with
Softcops (produced in 1984), a meditation on criminality during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Here the combination of music-hall and history is handled with dexterity and with an
astonishing sense of humour that reminds us of her earlier dark farce, Owners.
Caryl Churchill’s outstanding career has continued to develop to this very day,
encompassing a large variety of issues and dramatic methods. For example, in Serious Money,
which is a verse play, she resorts to the theatrical style of her first period of creation in order to
provide a satirical commentary on the London stock market crash of October 1987. Her attempt to
understand the significance of present history is obvious in Mad Forest: A Play from Romania
(1990), where she reconstructs the fall of Ceausescu from the perspective of the common people.
The atmosphere changes completely in The Skriker (1994), a fantasy whose hero is a kind of
northern goblin that follows two teenage girls to London, mischievously playing with their wishes.
Her most recent plays to date, Blue Heart, Hotel and Hot Fudge (1997) still dwell on social themes,
whereas A Number (2002) shifts the focus to the controversial subject of human cloning.
To sum up, Caryl Churchill has come to be ranked with the British dramatists of
international stature who have contributed to the refashioning of contemporary theatre with new
concepts of subject matter. Her concerns with historical contradictions, class ideologies, political
and sexual oppression have been sustained by consistent stylistic experimentation and non-realistic
theatrical formulae that provoke the spectators’ preconceptions. Like many other playwrights of her
generation, Churchill is indebted to Bertolt Brecht. The episodic structure of her dramas, the
alienation effect and the seemingly disconnected scenes which are subordinated to a general theme
certainly derive from epic theatre, but, in all cases, they have been integrated into a brilliant
theatrical view which combines the grotesque with documentary detail and symbolic devices. As a
matter of fact, she is second to none in the handling of space and time on the stage. Her favourite
technique lies in the juxtaposition of two different fictional epochs whose sharp contrast keeps the
audience alert. One particular example is the alternation between the settings in Cloud Nine, namely
the nineteenth century Africa and contemporary London, as well as in Top Girls, where the opening
fantasy differs from the ordinary life in the subsequent scenes. Churchill has continuously
diversified her dramatic strategies and now has turned more and more to a complete theatrical form
that blends music with dance, seeming to put Artaud’s well-known theory into practice. Indeed,
theatre can do without language.
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Bradbury, Malcom (editor). 1981. Contemporary English Drama. Stratford: Stratford-Upon-Avon
Studies
Brown, John Russel. 1982. A Short Guide to Modern British Drama. London: Heinemann
Educational Books
Cave, Richard Allen. 1987. New British Drama in Performance on the British Stage 1970-1985.
London: Colin Smythe Gerrards Cross
Innes, Christopher. 1992. Modern English Drama 1980-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
Worth, Katharine. 1973. Revolutions in Modern English Drama. London: Methuen London Ltd