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Ria Wilson:              Caryl Churchill is a playwright who wrote many plays such as: escape alone in 2016, here we go in 2015, ding dong the wicked in 2013, seven jewish children in 2009, drunk enough to say I love you in 2006, and many more. most of her performances feature very meaningful themes such as women's rights, she was inspired by the equal pay act in 1970 when she wrote vinegar tom, and abuse. my first impressions on Vinegar tom is brilliant because it features strong female leads and also it shows the hardships women faced in the 16th century, now a days no one would bat an eyelash if a women has a child without a father but then that was a HUGE no no!! because the female would be seen as a prostitute and inpure because of no sex before marriage.

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Ria Wilson:              Caryl Churchill is a playwright who wrote many plays such as: escape alone in 2016, here we go in 2015, ding dong the wicked in 2013, seven jewish children in 2009, drunk enough to say I love you in 2006, and many more. most of her performances feature very meaningful themes such as women's rights, she was inspired by the equal pay act in 1970 when she wrote vinegar tom, and abuse. my first impressions on Vinegar tom is brilliant because it features strong female leads and also it shows the hardships women faced in the 16th century, now a days no one would bat an eyelash if a women has a child without a father but then that was a HUGE no no!! because the female would be seen as a prostitute and inpure because of no sex before marriage.

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Caryl Churchill was born in London and emigrated to Montreal,
Canada. After moving back to the UK, she went to university in Oxford to study
English Literature. She started writing a play called ‘Owners’ so that she
could show: aggressive, getting ahead and doing well values in her style. Her
style consists of realism and she included the themes of feminism. She won an
Obie award for ‘Top Girls’ which features an all-female cast. She mainly
focused on writing plays that showed the difference between the genders, but
mainly focusing on how men are wrong and how bad women were being treated. She also wrote Vinegar Tom and Cloud nine

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Caryl Churchill was born in London and emigrated to Montreal,
Canada. After moving back to the UK, she went to university in Oxford to study
English Literature. She started writing a play called ‘Owners’ so that she
could show: aggressive, getting ahead and doing well values in her style. Her
style consists of realism and she included the themes of feminism. She won an
Obie award for ‘Top Girls’ which features an all-female cast. She mainly
focused on writing plays that showed the difference between the genders, but
mainly focusing on how men are wrong and how bad women were being treated. She also wrote Vinegar Tom and Cloud nine

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Gemma Terry

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Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938) is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non- naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes. Celebrated for works such as Cloud 9 (1979), (1982), Serious Money (1987), Blue Heart (1997), Far Away (2000), and (2002), she has been described as "one of Britain's greatest poets of and innovators for the contemporary stage". In a 2011 dramatists' poll by The Village Voice, five out of the 20 polled writers listed Churchill as the greatest living playwright.

Churchill was born in London, England, the daughter of Jan Brown, a fashion model and actress, and Robert Churchill, a political cartoonist. After World War II, her family emigrated to Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Churchill was ten years old. In Montreal, she attended Trafalgar School for Girls.

She returned to England to attend university in 1956, and in 1960 she graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, a women's college at Oxford University, with a B.A. degree in English Literature. She received the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize at Oxford and also began her writing career there. Her four earliest plays, Downstairs (produced 1958), You've No Need to be Frightened, Having a Wonderful Time (1960), and Easy Death (produced 1962) were performed at Oxford by student theatre ensembles. One of her plays, Downstairs was performed at the National Student Drama Festival in 1958 and won the first prize.

While raising a family in the 1960s and '70s Churchill began to write short radio dramas for BBC radio. These included The Ants (1962), Not, Not, Not, Not Enough Oxygen (1971), and Schreber's Nervous Illness (1972). She also wrote television plays for the BBC, including The After Dinner Joke (1978) and Crimes (1982). These, as well as some of her radio plays, have been adapted for the stage.

In her early work Churchill explored gender and sexuality through modernist theatre techniques of Epic theatre. In the mid 1980's she started to incorporate dance-theatre in her writing. A Mouthful of Birds (1986) is the first example of this and references the surrealist theatre tradition of Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty. The fragmented and surrealistic narratives in Churchill's work characterises her work as postmodernist.

In 1972, she wrote , a two-act, 14-scene play about obsession with power. It was her first professionally produced stage play and "her first major theatrical endeavour"; it was produced in London the same year.

She served as resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre from 1974 to 1975, and was the Royal Court's first female playwright in residence. She began collaboration with theatre companies such as Joint Stock Theatre Company and Monstrous Regiment (a feminist theatre collective). Both used an extended workshop period in their development of new plays. Churchill continues to use an improvisational workshop period in developing a number of her plays. During this period, she also wrote Objections to Sex and Violence (1974).

Her first play to receive wide notice was (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 effect. The play became successful in Britain and in the United States, winning an Obie Award in 1982 for best play of the year in New York.

Churchill gradually abandoned more conventions of realism, with her loyalty to feminist themes and ideas becoming a guiding principle in her work. She won an Obie Award for best play in 1983 with , "which deals with women's losing their humanity in order to attain power in a male-dominated environment." It features an all-female cast, and focuses on Marlene, who has relinquished a home and family to achieve success in the world of business. Half the action takes place at a celebratory dinner where Marlene mixes with historical, iconic and fictional women who have achieved great stature in a "man's world", but always at great cost. The other half of the play, set a year in the past, focuses on Marlene's family, where the true cost of her "successful" life becomes poignantly and frighteningly apparent. In Top Girls, Churchill made a note to describe the layout. She used the forward dash signal (/) to demonstrate a person interrupting the person speaking. She also used the asterisk symbol (*) to indicate a speech following on from a speech earlier than the one immediately before it.

Softcops (first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984), is a "surreal play set in 19th-century France about government attempts to depoliticize illegal acts." Justin Hayford of the Chicago Reader wrote that the play had little to offer to those who had already read Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (on which Softcops is based), and that the play "glosses Foucault's monumental work in Cliffs Notes fashion". In 2018, Michael Billington stated that Softcops "felt like a meditation on crime and punishment lacking Churchill's usual gift of narrative drive."

The play A Mouthful of Birds (1986) was co-written with David Lan. Wallace Shawn has argued that it is among the "rich, inventive" Churchill works that are responsible for theater remaining exciting in modern times. Cameron Woodhead of The Sydney Morning Herald billed the play as "a difficult pleasure to watch and a challenge to perform." Billington listed A Mouthful of Birds as one of Churchill's misfires, however, and dismissed the play as "mystifying in its attempt to create a dance-drama suggesting that the violence and ecstasy of Euripides' The Bacchae were alive in modern Britain."

Serious Money (1987), "a comedy about excesses in the financial world", is a verse play, chiefly written in rhyming couplets. It takes a satirical look at the vagaries of the stock market and its Thatcherite denizens. The play was highly acclaimed, perhaps in part because it played immediately after the stock market crash of 1987. Icecream ( Royal Court Theatre 1989) explores Anglo-American stereotypes. Richard Christensen of Chicago Tribune wrote that Icecream "doesn't have much depth, but it does have a quirky, creepy kick to it", describing it as "a small but telling piece of theater". Andrew Dickson of The New Yorker dubbed the play "wryly picaresque" in 2015.

In Churchill's play The Skriker (1994) includes distorted language, references to English folktales and evocations of modern urban life. The Skriker is an ancient shape-shifting fairy and death portent in a search for revenge and love. The play initially received lukewarm reviews from critics but is now considered among Churchill's successes.

"The prolific Churchill continued to push boundaries into the late 1990s. In 1997 she collaborated with the composer Orlando Gough to create 'Hotel,' a choreographed opera or sung ballet set in a hotel room. Also that year her surrealistic short play 'This Is a Chair' was produced." Reviews of the London opening of Hotel were favorable, but with the first piece ("Eight Rooms") generally considered superior to the second ("Two Nights"). In 2015, Moira Buffini of The Guardian listed This Is a Chair as one of Churchill's best works, stating that it "shows a real humility about the political inadequacy of playwrights."

Her 2002 play, , addresses the subject of human cloning and questions of identity. Churchill received an Obie Award in 2005 for this play. Her adapted screenplay of was shown on BBC TV in September 2008.

The play Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006) takes a critical look at what she sees as Britain's submission to the United States in foreign policy.

In 2010, Churchill was commissioned to write the libretto for a new short opera by Orlando Gough, as part of the Royal Opera House's ROH2 OperaShots initiative. The resulting work, A ring a lamp a thing, played for five performances in the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House.

Her 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 apparently unrelated but which accumulate into a startling mosaic, a portrayal of modern consciousness and the need for human intimacy, love and connection. The play will have its regional premiere at Sheffield Theatres in June 2018, directed by Caroline Steinbeis.

Ding Dong the Wicked (2013) has been described as a companion piece to Love and Information. Charles Spencer said in The Telegraph that the work is "little more than a clever dramatic exercise" but "nags away in the memory long after you have left the theatre." Matthew Tucker gave the Royal Court Theatre performance three out of five stars, dubbed the play "snappy" and wrote, "Some may find this latest offering terse and obscure, however, in the spirit of explorative theatre, Ding Dong The Wicked is an intriguing and satisfying production." A reviewer for Evening Standard argued, "What it all means is food for later reflection, but as always Churchill seems inventive, coolly socialist, bleak yet dazzling, a bit of a shaman. Although her technique sounds gimmicky, it works." Conversely, The Guardian's Michael Billington wrote that the work "feels as if it's cramming a trunkload of ideas into a tiny vanity case [...] the tightness of the format means there is no room to explore the source of so much private and public fury, or to differentiate between one society and another. In short, the play is too generalised to make any strong emotional impact."

The Royal Court Theatre premiere of Pigs and Dogs received a positive review in and moderately positive reviews in The Guardian, The Observer, and Evening Standard, with the last newspaper's Henry Hitchings stating, "While the incantatory style isn't consistently engaging, this is a striking parade of views on a subject that merits more sustained treatment." Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out said in a three-star review that the play "makes its point effectively if tersely". Mark Lawson of The Guardian praised Beautiful Eyes as a "sharp" comedy.

Churchill has published translations of Seneca's , Olivier Choinière's Bliss (Félicité), and August Strindberg's A Dream Play. Her version of A Dream Play was premiered at the National Theatre in 2005.

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.

Churchill is a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

In January 2009, she wrote a ten-minute play that explores a history of Israel, ending with the 2008 Israeli attack on Gaza. It was performed for free at the Royal Court Theatre, with a collection taken to donate to Medical Aid for Palestinians.

The Sunday Times condemned its "ludicrous and utterly predictable lack of even-handedness"; but for , "there are no heroes or villains, for all that Churchill decries what is happening in Gaza". Writers such as Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Melanie Phillips in her blog criticised the play as anti-Semitic, as did John Nathan. He noted that Churchill has said thatSeven Jewish Children is "not just a theatre event but a political event." He suggested that a play representing views of one community and critical of that community needed to be written by a member of that community. The Royal Court denied the accusation.

Churchill published the play, Seven Jewish Children - a play about Gaza, online, for free download and use. Churchill said: "Anyone can perform it without acquiring the rights, as long as they do a collection for people in Gaza at the end of it".

In November 2019, along with other public figures, 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.

In 1961 she married David Harter. They have three sons and live in Hackney, East London.

Churchill has received the following awards:

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Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938) is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non- naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes.

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As a writer, Caryl Churchill is elusive - she does not give interviews (as longtime collaborater James Macdonald told the New Yorker “You sometimes feel, as a writer, that you destroy the thing by talking about it”) and will only present her work is complete and once she knows what the script represents and how it should be percieved. Generally her scripts feature subjects that she has been interested in and mulled over for years, but often tackle gender politics, identity, sexual desire and death. Each piece has a timeless quality; no matter when the piece is set or was written, the words still have resonance in the present. Churchill still likes to make the audience think however, leaving most of her plays ‘open-ended’ so that the viewer has to make the conclusion and decide what happened next. 

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As a writer, Caryl Churchill is elusive - she does not give interviews (as longtime collaborater James Macdonald told the New Yorker “You sometimes feel, as a writer, that you destroy the thing by talking about it”) and will only present her work is complete and once she knows what the script represents and how it should be percieved. Generally her scripts feature subjects that she has been interested in and mulled over for years, but often tackle gender politics, identity, sexual desire and death. Each piece has a timeless quality; no matter when the piece is set or was written, the words still have resonance in the present. Churchill still likes to make the audience think however, leaving most of her plays ‘open-ended’ so that the viewer has to make the conclusion and decide what happened next. 

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D Vaughan

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Two things are frequently said about Caryl Churchill: that she is the greatest playwright alive, and that she is one of the most elusive. While she occasionally discusses her work with researchers and fellow theatre-makers, she has not granted an interview to a major newspaper since the nineteen-nineties; her communications with the press are generally restricted to letters to the editor on political causes. Many of her works-there are now more than fifty, including libretti, dance pieces, and translations-have been published with chatty forewords that nonetheless give next to nothing away: "Top Girls" (1982), a fractured, formally experimental examination of feminism and perhaps her most famous play, "came slowly," she writes, "it took '80 and '81 to work it out." 1989's "Icecream," a wryly picaresque comedy about Anglo-American relations, "is simply a play I wrote."

Churchill's reticence is all the more striking because she does not live in Salinger-like isolation-she's often to be seen at opening nights in London, and she is active in the protest movement. A young playwright I asked said admiringly that Churchill "puts all her swagger and gesture into the work," then compared her to Kate Bush. Some call her (though one suspects that Churchill hates this) "Saint Caryl." It is tempting to describe her as sphinxlike, but then the Sphinx did occasionally speak in public.

Even so, the playwright has rarely been so visible. After a long association with the Royal Court-the elegantly appointed Chelsea theatre that has been the nucleus for new British writing since the days of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker-she has returned to the National Theatre with a major play for the first time in a decade. Two major plays, in fact: back in April, a kaleidoscopic collage of scenes from the English civil wars, "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" (1976), was given an imposing new production by Lyndsey Turner (who then directed Benedict Cumberbatch in "Hamlet"). Later this month, Churchill opens a new work in the National's studio space, called "Here We Go." It is billed, with customary pithiness, as a "short play about death."

In New York, meanwhile, a new production of Churchill's inventive 1979 study of colonialism and sexual desire, "Cloud Nine," has just closed at the Atlantic Theatre Company, directed by her long-term collaborator James Macdonald. Next January, another new work will début at the Royal Court, the curtain-raiser for the theatre's sixtieth-anniversary season. It's called "Escaped Alone." Details are sparse-naturally-but the theatre's artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, hinted that it might be more autobiographical than previous works, describing it as being about four women who are roughly Churchill's age.

"Escaped alone" might be an appropriate phrase. Since her breakthrough, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, Churchill has not only weathered changes in theatrical taste-so many of her contemporaries, particularly other women, are now neglected-she has continued to speak powerfully to the present moment. Whether in her pioneering examinations of gender and identity politics ("Top Girls," "Cloud Nine"), cloning (2002's "A Number"), the dizzying shenanigans of the financial markets (1987's "Serious Money"), or terrorism and the death penalty (2000's "Far Away"), few writers have shown such ability to needle at anxieties that trouble and fascinate us in the here and now. How does she do it?

Churchill, of course, politely declined to answer that question or any others. But James Macdonald offered to explain why she has resisted interviews. "She's not some kind of recluse," he told me. "You sometimes feel, as a writer, that you destroy the thing by talking about it." But this also gives a clue to how Churchill works. The writing is solitary, interior, and often dwells on a subject that Churchill has been chewing over for years. Only when a piece is finished does she bring it out into the open. "It's incredibly rare these days that Caryl will give anyone a script until she's quite sure it's what she wants it to be."

What she will want is difficult to second-guess. The previous project Macdonald worked on, 2012's "Love and Information," is composed of fifty-seven self-contained scenes the script has no cues as to who exactly should speak the lines, let alone how; the only clue as to the context for each is a cryptic heading (SECRET, MEMORY HOUSE, FLASHBACK, CHINESE POETRY). The one before that was "Top Girls," which begins with a scene in which a cabal of famous women from across history-including the Victorian explorer Isabella Bird, Chaucer's Patient Griselda, and Pope Joan, who was legendarily elected pontiff in the ninth century-have a drunken dinner party.

"She thinks in terms of images," Macdonald said, adding, "The scripts are open-ended-they want you to enter into that world and play and find your own conclusions." Is Churchill a major presence in rehearsals? "Oh yes: she loves every aspect of the process. But she doesn't necessarily have answers."

Once upon a time, Churchill wrote plays for the radio. She was born in London in 1938 and married a young lawyer, David Harter, in 1961; by the end of the decade, the couple had three boys. Amid the demands of caring for young children, Churchill's working life in those years was solitary. Quick to be commissioned and cheap to produce, radio drama offered a means to get her work performed, along with a modest income. But one wonders if there was something else that opened the path to her subsequent experimentalism: unconstrained by the demands of staging and budget-a designer's whims, an artistic director's taste and crowded schedule-Churchill was free to conjure landscapes far beyond those that could be placed behind a proscenium arch. A drama about identical twins who detest each other was recorded in stereo, with the same actor playing both roles. Another is told in the garrulous voice of a schizophrenic patient, who pronounces himself, among a great deal else, "preoccupied with changing into a woman."

Churchill's interest in mutable, shifting identities has remained a major theme-and from the perspective of contemporary debates about gender and the essence of identity, seems almost prophetic. "A Number," written more than thirty years after "Identical Twins," is for two actors, playing a father and son; only as the action progresses does it become clear that the son is in fact an array of sons, cloned from the original, with results that are surreal and surreally funny. "Cloud Nine," likewise, toys with sexual identities and their confusions: it opens in a nameless portion of colonial Africa, with the wife of a Victorian administrator played by a man and with a black servant played by a white actor-because, Churchill explained, that is what the almighty British Empire expects them to be.

The playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose own brilliantly fabulist imagination brings Churchill to mind, pointed to Churchill's eagerness to push the boundaries of what theatre can do. "She recreates form with every play and asks a new formal question with every play. Each time when I sit down to write, I'm about two-thirds of the way through, and I think, 'Is this a play?' I like to imagine that Caryl Churchill thinks the same thing-maybe not in those terms, exactly, but there's always this question, is this a play?"

Though Churchill's formal experimentation is often mischievous-distractingly so, her critics say-the real world, with all its political cruxes and compromises, is never distant. When "Far Away" was staged last year at London's Young Vic theatre, it seemed unsettlingly prescient: written before the 9/11 attacks and the calamitous war on terror that ensued, it opens at nighttime, with a girl, Joan, staying at her aunt's house. Joan can't sleep and hears noises outside; it becomes clear that the noises are coming from nameless people (deportees? refugees? prisoners? migrant workers?) being transported, by truck, to a shed nearby. There is blood on the ground; violence has apparently been committed, though the aunt denies it ("There might be things that are not your business when you're a visitor in someone else's house").

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Two things are frequently said about Caryl Churchill: that she is the greatest playwright alive, and that she is one of the most elusive. While she occasionally discusses her work with researchers and fellow theatre-makers, she has not granted an interview to a major newspaper since the nineteen-nineties; her communications with the press are generally restricted to letters to the editor on political causes.

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You must research online to find news articles  about Caryl Churchill and summarise what the media and world of theatre think about her contribution to theatre of the 20th and 21st Century.

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You must research online to find news articles  about Caryl Churchill and summarise what the media and world of theatre think about her contribution to theatre of the 20th and 21st Century.

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Please add the link and then 100 words of your own discussing this theatre practitioner. What is she known for, what is her style, who are her contemporaries and how does she influence theatre.