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The birth of Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill was born in Finsbury, London, United Kingdom on September 3, 1938 -
Early life
After World War II, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada; Churchill was ten years old. In Montreal, she attended Trafalgar School for Girls. She returned to England to attend university. -
Education
She attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, with a BA degree in English Literature in 1956 and, in 1960, graduated. She received the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize at Oxford and began her writing career there. Her four earliest plays were performed at Oxford by student theatre ensembles. One of her plays, Downstairs, won first prize at the National Student Drama Festival in 1958. -
Marriage
She married barrister David Harter in 1961. They have three sons and live in Hackney, east London. -
Family and early career
While raising a family in the 1960s and 1970s, Churchill began to write short radio dramas for BBC Radio. These included The Ants, Not, Not, Not, Not Enough Oxygen, and Schreber's Nervous Illness. She also wrote television plays for the BBC, including The After-Dinner Joke and Crimes. These, as well as some of her radio plays, have been adapted for the stage. -
Unproduced and unpublished works
The Finnsburg Fragment (1961) – stage play
Marriage Of Toby's Idea Of Angela And Toby's Idea Of Angela's Idea Of Tony (1968) – stage play
The Swimming Club
The Loonies
Comic Strips from the Chinese
Angel -
Television
Some television projects Caryl has worked on:
Save It for the Minister – written with Mary O'Malley and Cherry Potter
The After-Dinner Joke
The Legion Hall Bombing
Crimes -
Themes and plays
In 1972, she wrote Owners, a two-act, 14-scene play about the obsession with power. It was her first professionally produced stage play and "her first major theatrical endeavor"; it was made in London the same year. She served as a resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre from 1974 to 1975. She was the Royal Court's first female playwright in residence. -
Cloud Nine
Her first play to receive wide notice was Cloud Nine (1979), "a farce about sexual politics," set partly in a British overseas colony during the Victorian era. It explores the effects of the colonialist/imperialist mindset on intimate personal relationships and uses cross-gender casting for comic and instructive products. The play became successful in Britain and the United States, winning an Obie Award in 1982 for best play of the year in New York. -
Early Work
In her early work, Churchill explored gender and sexuality through modernist theatre techniques of Epic theatre. In the mid-1980s, she started to incorporate dance theatre in her writing. A Mouthful of Birds is the first example of this and references the surrealist theatre tradition of Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty. -
Notable works
List of Carly's most notable plays:
Top Girls Cloud
9 Serious Money
Far Away
A Number Love and Information -
A Mouthful of Birds
The play A Mouthful of Birds (1986) was co-written with David Lan. Cameron Woodhead of The Sydney Morning Herald billed the play as "a difficult pleasure to watch and a challenge to perform." However, Billington listed A Mouthful of Birds as one of Churchill's misfires and dismissed the play as "mystifying in its attempt to create a dance-drama suggesting the violence and ecstasy of Euripides' The Bacchae were alive in modern Britain." -
Far Away
Far Away is a 2000 play by British playwright Caryl Churchill. It has four characters, Harper, Young Joan, Joan, and Todd, and is based on the premise of a world in which everything in nature is at war. At the same time, some critics have expressed reservations about the play's ending; many regards Far Away as one of Churchill's finest plays. -
A number
Her 2002 play, A Number, addresses the subject of human cloning and questions of identity. Churchill received an Obie Award in 2005 for this play. Her adapted screenplay of A Number was shown on BBC TV in September 2008. -
Translations
Churchill has published translations of Seneca's Thyestes, Olivier Choinière's Bliss (Félicité), and August Strindberg's A Dream Play. Her version of A Dream Play premiered at the National Theatre in 2005. -
Retrospective
The Royal Court Theatre held a 70th-birthday retrospective of her work by presenting readings of many of her most famous plays directed by notable playwrights, including Martin Crimp and Mark Ravenhill. -
Interest in Palestine
In January 2009, she wrote a ten-minute play that explores the history of Israel, ending with the 2008 Israeli attack on Gaza. It was performed free at the Royal Court Theater, with a collection taken to donate to Medical Aid for Palestinians. -
Awards and honors
Here are half of the awards Churchill has received:
1958 Sunday Times/National Union of Students Drama Festival Award Downstairs
1981 Obie Award for Playwriting, Cloud Nine
2001 Obie Sustained Achievement Award
2010 Inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame -
Love and Information
Her play Love and Information opened at the Royal Court Theatre in September 2012, directed by James Macdonald. It was well-received by critics. The play, featuring 100 characters and performed by a cast of 15, is structured as a series of more than 50 fragmented scenes, some no longer than 25 seconds, all of which are unrelated but which accumulate into an incredible mosaic, a portrayal of modern consciousness and the need for human intimacy, love, and connection. -
Politics
In November 2019, Churchill signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia, and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election. -
European Drama award
In April 2022, Churchill was named the recipient of the 2022 European Drama award in recognition of her life's work. The prize worth £65,000, given by German theatre Schauspiel Stuttgart and sponsored by the Baden-Württemberg ministry of science, research and arts, was canceled after her support of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions had been criticized.