Caryl Churchill

Caryl Lesley Churchill was born on 3 September 1938 in Finsbury, London, to Jan Brown, a fashion model and actress, and Robert Churchill, a political cartoonist. When she was ten, after the Second World War, her family moved to Montreal, Canada, where she attended Trafalgar School for Girls. She returned to England in 1956 to study at Oxford, graduating from Lady Margaret Hall in 1960 with a BA in English Literature. While at Oxford, she won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize and began writing. Her first four plays—Downstairs (produced 1958), You've No Need to be Frightened, Having a Wonderful Time (1960), and Easy Death (produced 1962)—were staged by student theatre groups. Downstairs took first prize at the 1958 National Student Drama Festival.

During the 1960s and 1970s, while raising a family, Churchill wrote short radio dramas for BBC Radio, including The Ants (1962), Not, Not, Not, Not Enough Oxygen (1971), and Schreber's Nervous Illness (1972). She also wrote television plays for the BBC, such as The After-Dinner Joke (1978) and Crimes (1982). Many of these radio and TV works were later adapted for the stage. Her early plays explored gender and sexuality through modernist epic theatre techniques. By the mid-1980s, she began incorporating dance-theatre into her writing, starting with A Mouthful of Birds (1986), which references the surrealist tradition of Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty. Her fragmented, surreal narratives are often described as postmodernist.

Churchill’s first professionally produced stage play was Owners (1972), a two-act, 14-scene piece about an obsession with power. From 1974 to 1975, she was resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre, the first woman to hold that position. She collaborated with companies like Joint Stock and Monstrous Regiment, a feminist theatre collective, both of which used extended workshops to develop new plays; Churchill continues to use improvisational workshops for many of her works. During this period, she also wrote Objections to Sex and Violence (1974).

Her first widely noticed play was Cloud Nine (1979), a farce about sexual politics set partly in a Victorian-era British colony. It examines how colonialist and imperialist mindsets affect intimate relationships, using cross-gender casting for comic and instructive effect. The play was successful in Britain and the United States, winning an Obie Award in 1982 for best play in New York. Churchill increasingly abandoned realist conventions, with feminist themes becoming a guiding principle. She won another Obie for best play in 1983 with Top Girls, which explores women losing their humanity to gain power in a male-dominated world. The all-female cast centres on Marlene, who sacrifices home and family for business success. Half the play takes place at a celebratory dinner with historical, iconic, and fictional women who achieved stature in a "man's world" at great cost; the other half, set a year earlier, reveals the painful cost of Marlene’s success. In Top Girls, Churchill used a forward dash (/) to indicate interruption and an asterisk (*) to show a speech following an earlier one.

Softcops, first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984, is a surreal play set in 19th-century France about government efforts to depoliticise illegal acts. Justin Hayford of the Chicago Reader wrote that the play offered little to those familiar with Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, on which it is based, calling it a "Cliffs Notes" gloss. In 2018, Michael Billington said Softcops felt like a meditation on crime and punishment lacking Churchill’s usual narrative drive.

A Mouthful of Birds (1986), co-written with David Lan, was described by Wallace Shawn as one of Churchill’s "rich, inventive" works that keeps theatre exciting. Cameron Woodhead of The Sydney Morning Herald called it "a difficult pleasure to watch and a challenge to perform." Billington, however, dismissed it as a misfire, calling it mystifying in its attempt to create a dance-drama suggesting the violence and ecstasy of Euripides’ The Bacchae were alive in modern Britain.

Serious Money (1987) is a comedy about excesses in the financial world. Churchill is celebrated for works including Cloud 9, Top Girls, Serious Money, Blue Heart (1997), Far Away (2000), A Number (2002), and Love and Information (2012). She has been called "one of Britain's greatest poets and innovators for the contemporary stage." In a 2011 dramatists’ poll by The Village Voice, six of the 20 writers surveyed named Churchill the greatest living playwright.