Too many articles about Caryl Churchill start with a tone of surprise that she is still a pioneering writer in her later years. Innovation is not necessarily the territory of the young, and Churchill is living proof that the myth of age paralleling conservativism is just that—a myth. At By Jove challenging and re-shaping myths is our game, and Churchill has become a radical inspiration for all of us when we try to dismantle the way society views women.
Caryl Churchill. Photo by Marc Brenner
A master of form, Churchill challenges our perception of what plays should look and sound like. Her most recent plays, premiered at The Royal Court, demonstrated her sharp political wit and eye for concept: Bluebeard, a fractured piece about a group of friends who discover one of them is a serial killer, is a biting satire of violence against women and ways it is normalised. The script is written with no characters specified, forcing a director to pick out the connecting voices and mould characters from the clues; a simple but effective way of killing the author while remaining a writer. Glass, the tale of a girl literally made of glass, breaks your heart within a cool ten minutes. Imp, the longest of the four presented plays, demonstrates the beauty of never firing Chekhov’s gun; Dot’s ‘imp in a bottle’ is threatened across the whole play, but never finds release. We are left with the banality of real life and the fantasies that drag us through it.
Churchill inspired By Jove to champion women’s voices. Her social engagement is never forced, but springs naturally from mountains of character. Escaped Alone focuses on four elderly women trapped by their circumstances, juxtaposed with satirical dystopias delivered in surreal monologues. In Sally’s backyard, Churchill explores the feminine narrative in ‘women’s spaces’, especially in relation to domesticity, in a context where the influence of men or fear cannot easily be removed:
‘if you’ve killed someone in a kitchen you’re not going to love that kitchen’ (Escaped Alone)
Even Churchill’s more naturalistic plays, such as Imp, are peppered with cheeky winks to the audience (Jimmy keeps describing neighbourhood dramas that are obviously Shakespeare plots or ancient classics) that shake them out of their rigid theatrical expectations. It is never enough for Churchill to mirror the horrors of society back onto our numbed eyes; she smashes the mirror like a girl made of glass, and makes us look back at each other.
I can’t help it: this has turned into a love letter. When creating our work we look to pioneers like Churchill to inspire our sense of possibility. If Love & Information can exist as a jumble of simple human moments, yet still appear whole, then our dependency on Aristotelian narrative (and thus patriarchal narrative) isn’t justified. If magical realism or science fiction can’t work on the stage, then why do we keep bringing back A Number or Far Away for revivals? Churchill continues to show us that socially charged and experimental writing belong on our main stages.
