Presents new scholarship on the innovative playwright Caryl Churchill, discussing her major plays alongside topics including sexual politics and terror.

Although now celebrated as a world-leading playwright, Caryl Churchill has received little attention for her socialism, which has been frequently overlooked in favour of emphasising gendered identities and postmodernist themes. Churchill’s Socialism examines eight of Churchill’s plays with reference to socialist theories and political movements. This well-researched and dynamic new book reframes Churchill’s work, positioning her plays within socialist discourses, and producing persuasive political readings of her drama that reflect much more of the political challenge that the plays pose. It additionally explores her uneasy relationship with postmodernism, which presents itself particularly in Churchill’s later plays. The book contains a very helpful chapter on socialist contexts, which outlines some of the key events, debates, and movements during the late 1960s up until the early 2000s. This chapter also offers an incisive critique of the easy acceptance by some socialists of a postmodernist rejection of grand narratives and political agency. An in depth examination of the rarely explored interconnections of utopianism and theatre, forms another chapter, where all eight of Churchill’s plays, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Mad Forest, The Skriker, and Far Away, are introduced. The plays are then discussed in pairs in a further four chapters with reference to communist historiography, the class/gender intersection, the end-of-history thesis, ecocritical challenges and postmodernism.

Includes a revival of her best-known play, "Cloud Nine" and a new translation, "Bliss".

Marlene thinks the eighties are going to be stupendous. Her sister Joyce has her doubts. Her daughter Angie is just frightened. Since its premiere in 1982, Top Girls has become a seminal play of the modern theatre. Set during a period of British politics dominated by the presence of the newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Churchill's play prompts us to question our notions of women's success and solidarity. Its sharp look at the society and politics of the 1980s is combined with a timeless examination of women's choices and restrictions regarding career and family. This new Student Edition features an introduction by Sophie Bush, Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, UK prepared with the contemporary student in mind. METHUEN DRAMA STUDENT EDITIONS are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. A well as the complete text of the play itself, this volume contains: · A chronology of the play and the playwright's life and work · an introductory discussion of the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the play was originally conceived and created · a succinct overview of the creation processes followed and subsequent performance history of the piece · an analysis of, and commentary on, some of the major themes and specific issues addressed by the text · a bibliography of suggested primary and secondary materials for further study.

A two-act play in which preconceptions about gender, romance, and "lifestyle" are scrambled, neutralized, and possibly even rebuilt.

One of Europe's greatest playwrights, Caryl Churchill has been internationally celebrated for four decades. She has exploded the narrow definitions of political theatre to write consistently hard-edged and innovative work. Always unpredictable in her stage experiments, her plays have stretched the relationships between form and content, actor and spectator to their limits. This new critical introduction to Churchill examines her political agendas, her collaborations with other practitioners, and looks at specific production histories of her plays. Churchill's work continues to have profound resonances with her audiences and this book explores her preoccupation with representing such phenomena as capitalism, genocide, environmental issues, identity, psychiatry and mental illness, parenting, violence and terrorism. It includes new interviews with actors and directors of her work, and gathers together source material from her wide-ranging career.