The Dramas of Caryl Churchill: the Politics of Possibility

Abstract

In one of Caryl Churchill’s recent plays, Top Girls, two sisters meet after a long separation and confront the differences and connections in their lives. With a quick leap of faith and imagination, one could replace those two sisters with Megan Terry and Caryl Churchill, and conjure up an extraordinary conversation about the joys and pitfalls of giving birth to and rearing contemporary feminist theatre. Like Terry, Churchill began writing plays in the 1950s and since that time has created an astonishingly large and significant body of work. Both eventually achieved an international reputation rare for women playwrights, and both have permanently altered the shape and direction of theatre through their insistent re-creation of the relationships between social and theatrical roles and gender. The one hundred or more plays written by these two women together establish the authenticity of feminist drama. Yet no spectator would ever mistake a Churchill play for a Terry play; in the contrasts as well as the similarities between their works, the complexities of the nature of feminist theatre emerge.