English Playwright Caryl Churchill
A Number, A Dream Play, Cloud Nine and Top Girls get top marks.
As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, The Royal Court is presenting Caryl Churchill's Top Girls in July 2006.
Caryl Churchill-"A Number" One on my Personal Playbill.
Here's a savvy scribe and regular from London's superb Royal Court Theatre who always put her characters and audiences to the test. As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, The Royal Court is presenting Caryl Churchill's Top Girls in July 2006.
Churchill, first female dramatist at the Royal Court, often premieres her work there. Many women have played many a role in Top Girls, a sociopolitical gem about the choices women make and the choices forced upon them, from Australia's Pamela Rabe to Canada's Goldie Semple. For 2006, The Royal Court is inviting LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) and director Peter James to join in the Top Girls fun and mind games at Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Downstairs. The original production was directed by Max Stafford-Clark when he was Court Artistic Director in 1982.
Who else but Caryl Churchill, would think of having five famous women (or infamous, depending how you look at it) to dinner at a posh restaurant and get them so sloshed that one actually vomits into a nearby planter (namely Pope Joan)? Other esteemed guests include Victorian traveler Isabella Lucy Bird, Japanese concubine-turned-Buddhist-monk Lady Nijo, Chaucer heroine Patient Griselda, Brueghl's forerunner of Xena Warrior Woman Dull Gret and Marlene of the Top Girls Employment Agency. Tosh !!! Marlene is now head honcho at work to the less enthused delight of her I-eat-men-for breakfast co-workers Nell and Win.
This dinner is Marlene's ultimate fantasy. Okay, she needs a life. But she left another one traumatic behind.
That's Caryl Churchill. Every Top Girl plays a dual role. Nothing is easy and nothing is answered
That theme is constant,from recent works A Number and A Dream Play to landmark pieces Top Girls and Cloud Nine. Churchill's work makes a lasting impression,like it or not. She writes about gender, class, inequality, environment and identity crisis in a most unusual style.
Churchill is an unrelenting socialist/feminist playwright who experiments upon the theatre canvas. You connect the dots. You pick up the non-linear pieces. There's no spoon-feeding here. Churchill has collaborated beautifully with my preferred rogues' gallery, from Wallace Shawn (directing his caustic Our Late Night for the Royal Court in 1999) to fellow playwright/ actor Sam Shepard, who starred in A Number for New York's Off Broadway Theatre Workshop.
To my mind, any Churchill play is the discerning audience's finest hour.
