Caryl Churchill
| Caryl Churchill | |
|---|---|
| Born |
3 September 1938 London, England, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Playwright |
| Genre | Theatre, Epic theatre |
Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938) is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes.
Her early work developed Bertolt Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of Epic theatre to explore issues of gender and sexuality. From A Mouthful of Birds (1986) onwards, she began to experiment with forms of dance-theatre, incorporating techniques developed from the performance tradition initiated by Antonin Artaud with his 'Theatre of Cruelty'. This move away from a clear Fabel dramaturgy towards increasingly fragmented and surrealistic narratives characterises her work as postmodernist.
Churchill was born in London, England, the daughter of Jan, a fashion model, and Robert Churchill, a political cartoonist. After World War II, her family emigrated to Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Churchill was ten years old. In Montreal, she attended Trafalgar School for Girls.
She returned to England to attend university, and in 1957 she graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, a women's college at Oxford University, with a B.A. degree in English Literature. She also began her writing career there. Her four earliest plays, Downstairs (produced 1958),You've No Need to be Frightened, Having a Wonderful Time (1960), and Easy Death (produced 1962) were performed at Oxford by student theatre ensembles.
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