Churchill: Plays One

This collection of Caryl Churchill's early plays is astounding. Tony Kushner rightly calls her the best playwright currently writing and these plays immediately make that clear. Churchill is an unabashedly feminist playwright whose work addresses issues of power and gender throughout history. Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, her plays are experimental, politically motivated, and ideologically challenging. They are also brilliantly clever, innovative, shocking, and often darkly funny. "Owners" is the most straight-forward selection here and centers around real estate agents in working-class England. "Traps" explores some similar issues of working-class England but approaches them from a more lyrical, less structured way; Churchill prefaces the play by explaining that it does not conform to the limits of reality, but is ruled by the imagination. This becomes more clear as the play progresses, and the final moments of the play--wherein all of the characters take turns bathing in a washtub onstage--take on a beautiful, almost hallucinatory quality. I skipped over "Light Shining on Buckinghamshire" and went straight to "Vinegar Tom," which is a brilliant account of the English witch hunts. Churchill presents the play from a feminist perspective, focusing on the plight of various women who are victimized by witch-hunters. Like Miller's "The Crucible," Churchill argues that sexual hysteria, repression, and misogyny were the driving forces behind witch hunts; Churchill's spare, stark play is considerably more cutting, more shocking, and more bleakly funny than Miller's. "Cloud Nine" is undoubtedly the highlight of this volume and stands as one of the most remarkable plays of the last 50 years. Act One takes place among a family of English colonists living in Africa during the Victorian Age; Act Two is set in 1970s England. Churchill brilliantly and devastating exposes the various levels of sexual and racial oppression in both time periods; she also radically suggests casting male actors as female characters, white actors as black characters, adult actors as children, etc. to reveal new ways of understanding the complex relationships within the play. In addition to its gripping plot, "Cloud Nine" addresses issues of feminism, racial identity, homosexuality, and oppression more cleverly than perhaps any other play of its time. These plays are highly recommended for any reader interested in modern drama or gender studies. They are complex but still highly accessible and less experimental than Churchill's later work.

A great work, shocking, interesting, funny.