Caryl Churchill by Mary Luckhurst (review)

Abstract

Mary Luckhurst. Caryl Churchill. Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. xiv + 208. $39.95. Caryl Churchill has been writing plays half century, during which time she has constantly experimented with dramatic form. Equally, as Mary Luckhurst amply demonstrates in Caryl Churchill, her plays have always responded to new social, political, and cultural challenges, especially as they affect women and those who have been marginalized or oppressed. Luckhurst's division of her book into chapters that focus on work decade by decade and her focus on one in production each decade illuminate both changing style and enormous range and versatility of her work. She never writes same twice. In part 1, Contexts, Luckhurst provides an overview of plays in to her life, her thought, and critical and historical contexts in which her work has been received. She notes well-known influence on Churchill of Brecht and of second wave feminism but concludes that while Churchill's significance to development of feminist political theatre is unmatched, her work is also informed by science, ethics, war, terror, climate and masculinity (24). Of particular interest is Luckhurst's discussion of an essay Churchill wrote in 1960, when she was only twenty-two: Ordinary, Not Safe: A Direction Drama? In this essay Churchill attacks new wave of Royal Court realistic drama by male dramatists such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Arnold Wesker and calls instead, in Luckhurst's words, for utopian quest to explore socialist agendas in ways that provoke change (12), using experimental forms and language, such as juxtapositions of song, prose and poetry, spectrum of emotional moods and cumulative effects of powerful stage pictures (13). Luckhurst demonstrates that throughout her career Churchill has followed her own agenda. In part 2 Luckhurst begins by reviewing Churchills early work, mostly radio plays, of 1960s, and also her six little-known plays television written between 1972 and 1981. Typical of political topicality of these plays is The Legion Hall Bombing (1979), documentary drama about boy accused without evidence of planting bomb in Northern Ireland. Churchill took her name off credits after BBC censored some of its content. Luckhurst's discussion of Churchills stage plays of 1970s begins with helpful account of The Hospital at Time of Revolution (1972, finally produced in 2013), based on writings of Algerian psychiatrist and political activist Frantz Fanon, whose complex self-knowledge Churchill admired; dramatizes the colonised victim's dilemma of complicity (50). Analyses of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and Vinegar Tom (1976) follow. Luckhurst is very good at providing succinctly historical information that is essential to our understanding of carefully researched plays: example, concerning English Civil War and various religious and political movements that inform Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Given Luckhurst's care in providing such instructive background material, it is unfortunate that in her discussion of Vinegar Tom she focuses on reliance on Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's polemical and essentialist Witches, Midwives and Nurses, which ties to 1970s feminism, and omits to mention at all use of Alan Macfarlane's Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, which underpins play's still-relevant socialist understanding of economic dynamics at work among different kinds and conditions of individual women. Luckhurst does offer critique of her chosen key production decade, Cloud Nine (1979), suggesting that from perspective of more recent views about gender, it may have become a history play as relation between biology, gender identity and sexual orientation is no longer assumed to be straightforward (80). …