“I’d just come out of the hospital after a particularly gruesome late miscarriage, still quite groggy and my arm ached because they’d given me an injection that didn’t work. The same year Churchill’s first major stage play was produced at London’s Royal Court Theatre, Owners, about a woman’s growth toward independence from her coarse husband that incorporates issues of gender and class. “We did not want to shore up a capitalist system we did not like,” Churchill has asserted. What politicised me was being discontent with my own way of life-of being a barrister’s wife and just being at home.” During the period Churchill wrote radio dramas, but a new life of engagement in social issues began when her husband left his job to work for a legal aid group in 1972. I had small children and was having miscarriages. As she recalled, “I didn’t really feel a part of what was happening in the sixties. in English in 1960.Ĭhurchill married the barrister David Harter in 1961 and spent the decade at home raising three sons. liking things actually happening.” Churchill has attributed the relative scarcity of women playwrights to the upbringing of girls, who are encouraged to be passive rather than active and are taught to avoid confl ict, which “lends itself much more readily to the letter, the diary-to the reflective form.” Churchill’s first two plays, Downstairs (1958) and Having a Wonderful Time (1960), were produced at Oxford, where she received a B.A. “It was a turning point,” as she recalled. She wrote her first play in response to a friend’s need for something to direct. Eliot, and Bertolt Brecht, all of whom she has acknowledged as important influences. Having begun writing short stories as a schoolgirl, Churchill would spend one summer helping to paint sets for a summer theater, but she did not “put the two things together”-writing and the stage-until her studies at Oxford and exposure to the works of Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, T. After spending the war years in London, when she was 10 Churchill and her family moved to Montreal, where she was educated in a private school before returning to England in 1957 to attend Oxford. Churchill’s first exposure to the theater was the Christmas pantomimes she attended and then imitated to entertain her parents at home. I grew up with his cartoons of the war-of Goebbels and Mussolini.” Her mother, who left school at 14, worked as a secretary, model, and fi lm actress. “Cartoons are really so much like plays,” Churchill has said, “an image with somebody saying something. Her father, a cartoonist, would have a major impact on her future dramatic work. A succession of powerful and challenging plays have followed, including Top Girls (1982), Fen (1983), Serious Money (1987), Mad Forest (1990), and Far Away (2000), but Cloud Nine has retained its lead position as essential Churchill: a summary statement of the playwright’s amazing theatrical resources and brilliant repossession of the Shavian drama of ideas.Ĭhurchill was born in 1938 in London. With Churchill, as critic Benedict Nightingale once commented, “We can no longer patronise women playwrights as peripheral.” Cloud Nine, first performed in Britain in 1979 and in New York in 1981, was Churchill’s breakout play, gaining her international recognition as an accomplished and unavoidable force in modern drama. Churchill would emerge from a group of politically engaged British playwrights working in the radical theater movement who challenged the dominance of the social realistic drama pioneered by John Osborne and the psychological theater of Harold Pinter to become one of the most performed and admired con-temporary playwrights. Of all the plays of the 1970s and 1980s that offered a radical and daring reassessment of sex, race, and gender, Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill is certainly one of the most innovative and timeless in treating its subjects in the widest possible context of power politics, patriarchy, and modern identity. Caryl Churchill, Interview in Ms., May 1982 Max, the director, even said, at the beginning “Well shouldn’t you perhaps be doing this with a woman director?” He didn’t see that it was his subject as well. There was nothing that also involved straight men. I felt there were quite a few women’s groups doing plays from that point of view. was to write a play about sexual politics that would not just be a woman’s thing. One of the things I wanted very much to do, in Cloud Nine.
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