Abstract
<p>Caryl Churchill is one of the most widely performed female dramatists in contemporary British theatre. She is arguably the most successful and best-known socialist-feminist playwright to have merged from Second Wave feminism. Her plays have been performed all over the world. In her materialist plays, she shows the matters of culture, education, power, politics, and myth. Her oeuvre hovers over the material conditions which testify to the power relations within society at a given time in history. Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, and theorist in cultural studies points out the dynamics of power relations in social life throughout ideas such as capital, field, habitus, symbolic violence, theories concerned with class and culture. The overarching concern for the purpose of this essay is to analyse Churchill’s <em>Serious Money </em>(1987) in the light of Bourdieu’s sociological concepts. In accordance with Bourdieu, there exist various kinds of capital (cultural, economic, social, and symbolic) which distinguish every individual’s status both in society and in relation to other individuals. The present study attempts to show that in <em>Serious Money</em>, the capital especially economic capital forms the foundation of social life and dictates one’s position within the social order and respectively, determining the power discourse in the matrix of social life.</p>
Highlights
Caryl Churchill is one of the mainstream political playwrights in contemporary British theatre
Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, and theorist in cultural studies points out the dynamics of power relations in social life throughout ideas such as capital, field, habitus, symbolic violence, theories concerned with class and culture
This play uses the characters found on the floor of the London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) to examine what happens to people and by extension society, when the ability to accumulate wealth becomes the only gauge that success is measured by
Summary
Caryl Churchill is one of the mainstream political playwrights in contemporary British theatre. According to Pattie (2006), “Churchill’s 1970s work blended a strong commitment to both socialism and feminism with an interest in experimentation Her formally innovative plays combined an analysis of gender and economic oppression, both in contemporary Britain and in other historical ages”. One could mention her stance against globalisation, and capitalism The latter an issue most manifest in Serious Money—a play written in the wake of the Big Bang, the Thatcher-era deregulation of British markets. It is money which is merchandised in LIFFE (the London International Financial Futures Exchange). Pertinent to the subject matter of Serious Money, the present article attempts to read the relationships between what Bourdieu calls social agents, in the light of the three above mentioned key terms in his sociological theories
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