Churchill Plays: 1: Owners; Traps; Vinegar Tom; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire; Cloud Nine

Description

In Traps, a set of characters meet themselves and their pasts to create "plenty of sinewy lines and joyous juxtapostions" (Plays and Players); Vinegar Tom "is set in the world of seventeenth-century witchcraft, but it speaks, through its striking images and its plethora of ironic contradictions, of and to this century " (Tribune); Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is set during the Civil War and "unflinchingly shows the intolerance that was the obverse side of the demand for common justice. Deftly, it sketches in the kind of social conditions. that led to hunger for revolution The play has an austere eloquence that precisely matches its subject." (The Guardian) Cloud Nine sheds light on some of the British Empire's repressed dark side and is "a marvelous play - sometimes scurrilous, always observed with wicked accuracy, and ultimately, surprisingly, rather moving. It plunges straight to the heart of the endless convolutions of sexual mores and does so with acrobatic wit." (Guardian) Owners:"I was in an old woman's flat when a young man offering her money to move came round, that was one of the starting points of the play" (Caryl Churchill). The plays in this volume represent the best of Churchill's writing up to and including her emergence onto the international theatre scene with Cloud Nine.

Caryl Churchill is an award-winning playwright, whose plays are renowned for their striking influence upon contemporary British theatre practices. Indicative of her enduring impression upon the theatrical landscape, Churchill has won Obie Awards for her widely celebrated plays Cloud 9 (1979), Top Girls (1982), Serious Money (1987) and A Number (2002). Further cementing her reputation as an outstanding playwright, in 2002 Churchill won an Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement and in 2010 was placed in the American Theatre Hall of Fame. She continues to produce innovative and provocative work, such as Seven Jewish Children - a play for Gaza (2009) and Love and Information (2012), and in January 2016 her latest full-length play, Escaped Alone, opened at the Royal Court Theatre to great acclaim. With an illustrious theatre career that transcends four decades, Caryl Churchill is arguably more than just one of Britain's most revered female playwrights; she is one of Britain's most respected and groundbreaking working today.

Cloud Nine ought now to be established as one of the great psycho-sexual comedies of the 20th century. Evening Standard Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine is the cleverist, drollest, most sexily experimental exercise in "compare and contrast" that British theatre has probably ever seen. Daily Telegraph This is the play that established Caryl Churchill as the most imaginatively daring of our major dramatists; and, nearly 30 years after its premiere, it still seems not only remarkably inventive but as sharp about the contradictions of gender as anything that has been written since. The Times