One of England’s most well known modern playwrights of her time is, Caryl Churchill. Throughout her career she has strived at play writing to make the world question gender roles, stereotypes and issues that are faced with peoples daily problems, for example, political and sexual oppression, and violence. Caryl Churchill has been part of many aspect of theater performance throughout her almost sixty year career. Not only has she been a strong force on the stage, but has also had strong influences with radio and television.
She is truly a talented woman dabbling in not only a Brechtian style of theatre that has been commented on time and time again, but also musicals of a sort. Author Laura Doan, of “The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment” states, “Caryl Churchill’s work is notable for its open-endedness, for the peculiar relationship it establishes between the play and the play goer, and for what Kritzer terms a “theatre of process” that “invites participation through a gestic presentation of existing realities that demand questioning and reformulation”. ‘ (Doan).
Caryl Churchill likes to focus attention on her ability as a writer to present a clear message to her audiance. Caryl Churchill’s audiences are strongly encouraged to have their ‘eyes on the course’ and not ‘on the finish’, and that helps the audience really connect with her plays. An exceptionally well known ‘Caryl Churchillian’ strategy is when she’s plotting she uses a combination of two completely different theatrical worlds. (Aston). This ‘Caryl Churchillian’ strategy gives the audience a chance to be drawn into the world of the character by keeping the audience’s “eyes on the course”.
The audience is informed not to focus on the ending, because when a person is concerned about the ending of a play, the audience will miss out on the play’s entire message. The reason Caryl Churchill uses these two completely different theatrical strategies is to one, to let the audience to become fully aware of the more important things happening out in the world around them then what is happening in their own everyday lives, and two, to get the audience out of their comfort zone.
Caryl Churchill tries to change our outlook on different life situations for example, the way Caryl Churchill uses characters that show the most difficult and biggest struggle in their life at the moment. Through these bold moves you can see that. Caryl Churchill spent a lot of her time working on unusual set of circumstances to make her playwrights stand out from others. The first strategy she uses different themes and emotions to keep each member of the audience in touch with a certain character in the playwright.
According to the book Feminine Focus, “Caryl Churchill’s strength as a dramatist is that her imagination is engagingly theatrical as well as disturbingly political; it portrays the individual in social contexts that emerge as the source of most problems and the necessary site of their potential solution. ” (Brater). According to Victoria Bazon, Churchill started, “Employing a collaborative creative process that involved the actors and the director in the development of the play, Churchill became one of the most important playwrights of the ’80s.
Steeped in left politics, committed to “Churchill is a writer who uses drama to explore histories in nonlinear, non-generational terms. The play that most explicitly deals with the relation between feminism and history is Top Girls, first performed at the Royal Court in 1982. ” (Bazon 118-119). Caryl Churchill describes her plays, “tended to be about a bourgeois middleclass life and the destruction of it” (Brater) and that’s exactly what Caryl Churchill does in her works.
Having problems that can relate to the audience allows the readers to be comfortable and think about the issues portrayed in her plays. The way Caryl Churchill reaches out to the audance and makes realistic p throughout her plays is a very good angle to have in one’s writings because it lets the author bring up serious and touchy subjects that the audience can relate with, it really opens up a new mind set.
The second strategy she often used in her plays is to keep the audience observant and paying attention so they would not miss the build up to the meaning of the play. ‘Caryl Churchill uses the Brechtain technique and her play’s are almost always perfectly constructed by many “loosely connected scenes”; this doesn’t necessarily mean the scenes “join up” with each other, but to a certain point the scenes build up the meaning of the message. ‘ (Aston).
Through using the Brechtain technique it makes a molding of the general meaning of her play. “As the author of more than thirty-five plays, many of which have been produced on radio, television and in the “live” theater, and all of which challenge conventional assumptions about the roles of women and men, she can lay claim to an achieved stature as a playwright and as a feminist. ” (Keyssar). Caryl Churchill has been famous for using songs in her works.
The songs serve to emphasize the postmodern feminism of Caryl Churchill’s “sign-systems”; the structural placement of the songs emphasizes the feminist position against traditional male dramatic structures, while simultaneously criticizing traditional patriarchal mistreatment of women. ‘ (Price). Caryl Churchill’s placement of the songs is very similar to Cixous belief, which is that “feminine writing is not merely a new style of writing; it is the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural standards”. Price). Caryl Churchill admits to “being troubled by some reviewers’ responses to her work. “I’m accused of being both too optimistic and too pessimistic … and of being too philosophical and aesthetic and not sufficiently political. ” But she also feels increasingly confident that her plays are political, and importantly so. What she wants to do, she continues, is what she sees feminism as doing–revising history of the past and in the present.
But then, she adds, she wants to do something more; what that is exactly, she will only know when she writes her next play. ” (Keyssar). Throughout Caryl Churchill’s form of feminism writings, she focuses on the deliberate choices women must make about their own presentation for getting more advance in this “male” world. ” (Noble). Caryl Churchill started this trend of feminism throughout her plays and has received most of her fame from the basis of being a socialist-feminist; she has been writing about women’s needs to establish for themselves and for future women. Caryl Churchill took a great deal of time focusing on the combination of the theatrical experimentation with the interest on the celebration of women and the way she used suspenseful plotting in her plays.
Through her writings, she “explores the meaning of feminist empowerment. She examines the dichotomy between traditional women’s work, which centers on concern for and nurturing of others, and traditional men’s work, which is focused on power and competition. She shows that women have been able to compete but that without concern for the powerless, winning such competitions does not constitute a feminist victory. “(Haley). “Caryl Churchill has constantly exploded and refashioned theatrical forms, marrying the shape and movement of a play to the ideas expressing. ” (Benedict).
Her themes and goals of all her works has definitely left a mark on the society because not only does her works reach out to many different audiences and readers but many of her readers felt that they can relate to any of her plays in a certain, special way. “Whatever her politics and philosophy, Churchill brings a fire and an energy, a special eye and ear, to the postmodern English drama. She is an inspiration to the feminist movement and to women intellectuals around the world. ” (Staub). Caryl Churchill will always be known as an excellent English female, who has truly changed the writing world forever.
