Culture, Society and Art Notes
Caryl Churchill: * Caryl Churchill is a British playwright known for dramatizing the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes. “While reconceiving theatre in a number of important ways, Churchill's work demonstrates the value and increasing potential of theatrical representation for feminist-socialist empowerment.” * Her early work developed Bertolt Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of 'Epic theatre' to explore issues of gender and sexuality. “Churchill challenges audiences to join their imaginations with hers in seeking answers to the difficult questions posed by her plays. She does not ask audiences to suspend disbelief or surrender to the playwright's point of view. Instead, by encouraging imaginative reciprocity, her plays empower the audience to question and see new possibilities in what has previously been accepted.” * Churchill was of the sixties generation (born in 1938), then a second-wave feminist, a socialist, anti-war and anti-colonial.
Plays: Top Girls (1980), Vinegar Tom (1976), Traps (1976), Fen (1982)

Literature Review FOR: - The ways in which Caryl Churchill uses the techniques of Bertolt Brecht- Brecht wanted to reveal truth and the effect of politics within his theatre. Not allowing his audience to fall into a trap or become emerged within the characters and their story, but to simply show a message.
- The 1980s were synonymous with the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female Prime Minister, and with the political doctrine of monetarism. It is important to understand the extent to which the famously titled ‘Iron Lady’, who declared that ‘There is no such thing as society’, stood for everything that Churchill opposed.
- It is the influences of pre-war surrealism and the post-war politics of Absurdist drama (especially Ionesco) as well as the minimalism of Beckett that have always stood out in her work.
- Churchill's main trap, however, is, surprisingly, Harold Pinter: the cluttered stage recalls The Caretaker, the sexual mix-and-match recalls The Collection, the plea to home recalls The Room, the Christies' love play recalls The Lover. The phrase "I speak fluent jargonese" embraces many a Pinter play, and Churchill indulges in Pinter's verbal techniques of contradiction, tautology, disjunction, as well as repetition of word, beat, and gesture

Literature Review AGAISNT: * The noted similarities to Pinter and Mamet remain as important, I believe, as the lack of common ground between Churchill and Henrik Ibsen or Arthur Miller.
Useful Links: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/my-hero-caryl-churchill-by-sadie-jones http://www.womenwriters.net/editorials/PriceEd1.htm https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jdtc/article/viewFile/1731/1695&a=bi&pagenumber=1&w=100 http://www.outofjoint.co.uk/production/caryl-churchill-and-the-drama-of-terrors