Caryl Churchill

One playwright in the Contemporary Theatre Unit is Caryl Churchill. She was born in 1938 in London, moving to Canada after WW2 with her family. She is most known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her non-naturalistic techniques, exploring sexual politics and for her feminist themes which can most certainly be seen in her play Top Girls. She was inspired by Brecht's use of Epic Theatre as she could use his style to explore gender and identity, but from the 1980s onward was more inspired by Artaudian techniques as shown by her experimentation in dance theatre. 

In 1960 she graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, a woman's college at Oxford University where she gained a BA in English Literature. This is potentially where her feminist themes began to develop as she was constantly surrounded by women who wanted to make a better life and thus needed some feminist theory to help get them there due to misogyny. It is at Oxford that she began to write plays with her first four being performed by a student theatre ensemble from the university. 

In the 1960s/70s, she wrote short radio dramas for BBC Radio and TV plays for the BBC. Between 1974-5 she was the resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre which shows that she was experimental as the Royal Court allows young experimental playwrights (such as Alice Birch who wrote AOAS) to write plays for them. 

It was in 1979 that she began to receive wide notice for her play Cloud Nine which is the play that we looked at in school. The play, renowned in the US and Britain, explores the effects of colonialist/imperialist mindset on intimate personal relationships and uses cross-gender casting for comic and instructive effect. The first act is set in Africa whereas the second act is set in London one hundred years after the first act and is, in its simplest form, a massive love hexagon - with some relationships that aren't strictly legal. The actors switch roles between acts as previously mentioned characters are played by the opposite gender or race. For example, when a character needs to be more masculine they are played by a woman. The main themes that I can pick out are the confusion of gender/sexuality, the idea of the past in the present, and the oppressive nature of violence. Brechtian techniques that I spotted is the use of songs and the episodic structure. The play won an Obie Award in 1981. Churchill is still writing. 

The video below shows an extract from Cloud Nine and shows the relationship between the lady of the house and her child's nanny: 

This is a good first attempt at Churchill's style, although the casting choice was not very wise as the character that I played should be played by an overly effeminate man in order to stick to her style truly. I did try and display this by being overly dramatic as would be expected but I think this fell flat due to lack of knowledge of the script and the kiss towards the end of the scene - I had never done stage kisses in AOAS, which many of the other class members had done, and thus felt a bit put out by the action.

This scene certainly shows the confusion of sexuality as my character clearly has issues about her own hence why she kisses the nanny. However, she exclaims that she is in love with a man, so either she is very confused, is being manipulated by Harry, the man in question, or is manipulating the nanny.

Below is the synopsis that I got from Wikipedia:

Act I
Clive, A British colonial administrator, lives with his family, a governess and servant during turbulent times in Africa. The natives are rioting and Mrs Saunders, a widow, comes to them to seek safety. Her arrival is soon followed by Harry Bagley, an explorer. Clive makes passionate advances to Mrs Saunders, his wife Betty fancies Harry, who secretly has sex with the servant, Joshua, and Clive's son, Edward. The governess Ellen, who reveals herself to be a lesbian, is forced into marriage with Harry after his sexuality is discovered and condemned by Clive. Act 1 ends with the wedding celebrations; the final scene is Clive giving a speech while Joshua is pointing a gun at him.

Act II
Although Act II is set in 1979, some of the characters of Act I reappear – for them, only 25 years have passed. Betty has left Clive, her daughter Victoria is now married to an overbearing Martin, and Edward has an openly gay relationship with Gerry. Victoria, upset and distant from Martin, starts a lesbian relationship with Lin. When Gerry leaves Edward, Edward, who discovers he is in fact bisexual, moves in with his sister and Lin. The three of them have a drunken ceremony in which they call up the Goddess, after which characters from Act I begin appearing. Act II has a looser structure, and Churchill played around with the ordering of the scenes. The final scene shows that Victoria has left Martin for a polyamorous relationship with Edward and Lin, and they are sharing custody of their son Tommy. Gerry and Edward are on good terms again, and Betty becomes friends with Gerry, who tells her about Edward's sexuality.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_9_(play)