![\"12plays-churchill\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/12Plays-Churchill.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nCaryl Churchill is the presiding playwright of our era. At 78, every play she writes is an event \u2013 not because of their rarity, or a forelock-tugging spirit of sentimentality, but because each text explains our time to us, shows us the paths we are taking. She ended 2015 with Here We Go<\/em><\/a>, her devastating shard about death and old age; she began 2016 with Escaped Alone<\/em>, another play about age that somehow segued into dystopian surreality. \u2018Terrible rage,\u2019 the phrase that its homely monologist threw out again and again, proved as good a response as any to the tumult of subsequent months. I think of it often.<\/p>\n Churchill is prolific: I probably have texts of most of her plays, but there are some I haven’t yet read. I have, surprise, a lot of books. And I have, surprise, not read them all. As old year ticks into new, I thought I\u2019d spend a couple of weeks reading an unfamiliar play each day. Twelve plays, 12 posts: welcome to 12 Plays of Xmas.<\/p>\n Churchill seems a good place to begin \u2013 and I\u2019m starting with her own beginnings. Owners<\/em> was her first professionally-staged play, written for the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1972. Like much of Churchill\u2019s work, it seems uncannily timely; set in \u2018a developing bit of north London,\u2019 it\u2019s about gentrification, aspiration, determination and social change. In other words, it\u2019s a play about house prices.<\/p>\n Marion is the forward-march protagonist. Married to a failing butcher, captivated by a zen-like ex, she sets her sights on money, property, a baby \u2013 none of it necessarily hers, but that shouldn\u2019t be a problem. The tone is ruthlessly realist, blackly farcical: a dying old age pensioner, an extravagantly unsuccessful suicide. Churchill reports the spread of the fashionable fitted kitchen (\u2018\u2019all white and steel and everything in it the same height. No handles. Knives on a magnet just held to the wall\u2019), jabs the text with jokes and terror.<\/p>\n Owners at Yale Repertory Theatre 2013. Photo: Joan Marcus\/Christopher Ash<\/p><\/div>\n What would you have predicted the author of Owners<\/em> might become? Mike Leigh with sharper jokes, maybe. There\u2019s an arch but unflinching tone to the dialogue (Churchill says she\u2019d been reading Orton at the time) that moved into the semi-period chatter of Cloud Nine<\/em> and Top Girls<\/em>, and more recently recurs in some of the scenelets of Love and\u00a0Information<\/em> and the familiar banter of Escaped Alone<\/em>. Churchill\u2019s social and political territory has remained too \u2013 rug-pulling plays that explore current anxieties or uncannily intuit anxieties just around the corner: politics from geopolitical, identity, environmental. When Escaped Alone<\/em><\/a> is revived next month, just one year after its premiere, it will sound less like apocalyptic fantasy and more like straight reportage.<\/p>\n Churchill\u2019s complicated feminism remains too \u2013 a weave of anger, analysis and complicity. Marion is, like Marlene in Top Girls<\/em>, an early driver of the Thatcherite revolution \u2013 a stormtrooper of aspiration who leaves weaker sisters to die in the snow with nary a backward glance. The structure is less unexpected, the voracious reinvention less keen. But it\u2019s more interesting to think of how Churchill has kept changing, kept challenging herself, her colleagues and audiences. After Owners,<\/em> she moved smartly through the 1970s onto witch trials, the English civil wars and the sexual revolution. She is still moving on.<\/p>\n Sample stage direction<\/strong>\u00a0\u2018Worsley comes in. His wrists, neck and arm are still bandaged. His left leg is in plaster.\u2019<\/em> Owners\u00a0<\/em>is included in Caryl<\/em>\u00a0Churchill – Plays: 1<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nSample quote<\/strong>\u00a0Marion: \u2018I work like a dog. Most women are fleas, but I\u2019m the dog.\u2019<\/p>\n