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Churchill's Theatre
“[Churchill's] scripts are open-ended—they want you to enter into that world and play and find your own conclusions.” - Caryl Churchill's long-time collaborator James Macdonald for The New Yorker [link to article "Caryl Churchill’s Prophetic Drama"]
Churchill's Theatre: About
Caryl Churchill’s theatre is iconic for its rejection of the Aristotelian model. We see this in Love and Information through the customizable structure, the lack of central plot, and no named characters. In The Theatre of Caryl Churchill, historian R. Darren Gorbert suggests the play is instead focused on asking the epistemological questions:
How do I know I am in love?
How do I remember this apparent fact?
In the absence of memory, is love possible?
"Her plays offer fragmentation instead of wholeness, many voices instead of one, demands for social change instead of character development, and continuing contradiction instead of resolution." - Amelia Howe Kritzer in The Plays of Caryl Churchill : Theatre of Empowerment
Churchill’s theatre often reflects her concerns with the contemporary world. Top Girls comments on the divide between laboring women and individualist Thatcherites who conformed to androcentric (male-dominated) workplaces during the early 1980s, Seven Jewish Children was written in response to the 2008 Israeli airstrike on Gaza, and Love and Information asks how we survive under the constant barrage of information granted by the digital age. Beyond analyzing social issues, Churchill often explores themes of desire. As described by Dr. Peter Buse, “They are desires which social and political structures are unwilling to accommodate - the desires of the oppressed, and most often, of women” (Buse [link to the British Council's biography on Churchill]). Through these uniquely feminist thematic ventures, Churchill was able to bring a new conversation to the mainstream theatre world. Additionally, Churchill changed the language of theatre; for example, she is credited with coining the “/” to indicate interruption in dialogue, which is used widely by modern playwrights.
Churchill’s generation of playwrights takes inspiration from Brechtian theatre. Postmodernist tools such as episodic scenes, metatheatricality, and formal experimentation are present in most of Churchill’s work. Mike Rugnetta posits “[Brecht] wanted each scene to work independently, and for the audience to have to work out how to put them all together” (Rugnetta, 6:03-6:08 [link to YouTube Video "Crash Course Theatre #44"]). We see that Churchill applied this quite literally to Love and Information through the multitude of seemingly unrelated scenes.
Building off of the theatrical lineage before her, Caryl Churchill used her skill to challenge the status quo and tackle pertinent historical themes.
Churchill's Theatre: Inventory
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