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Life and politics. Contexts -- Early plays and collaborations, the 1960s-1970s. Transformations: the long Sixties -- Stage work in the 1970s. key production: Cloud nine -- Thatcherism, the New Right, and the 1980s. key production: Top girls -- Revolution and cross-art form experiments, 1990-2000. key production: Mad forest -- Cross-art form collaborations and far away -- Churchill in the 21st century. key production: A number -- Afterword. Impossible to catagorize and always unpredictable in her innovation, Caryl Churchill is one of the world's great playwrights. Mary Luckhurst's volume examines her various aesthetic agendas, selected pioneering productions, and the differing working methods and collaborations she has embarked upon. 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
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