Caryl Churchill

Caryl Churchill, born in 1938, British playwright, whose political perspective and experimentation with theatrical forms made her one of the most important contemporary female playwrights in Britain. Churchill's writing focuses on issues of class and economics and their effect on women. She was born in London and lived in Montréal, Canada, from 1948 to 1955. Her first play was produced in 1958, while she was a student at the University of Oxford. While a homemaker, she wrote a series of radio plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the 1960s. Her first professionally produced play was Owners (1972) at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

Churchill has written plays in extended workshop processes with the directors and actors of two British theater groups: Monstrous Regiment and Joint Stock. Her work with Monstrous Regiment resulted in Vinegar Tom (1976), a powerful play about the European burning of witches. Churchill's association with Joint Stock resulted in her most famous play, Cloud 9 (1979), about the relationship of colonialism and gender oppression. Its off-Broadway staging by American theater director and choreographer Tommy Tune won Churchill an Obie Award (1980; the Obie Awards are off-Broadway honors given by the Village Voice newspaper).

Churchill's other plays include Top Girls (1982), about the choice for women between motherhood and business success; Fen (1983), about the working class in rural England; and Serious Money (1987), about greed in the stock market. Churchill also wrote Mad Forest (1991), about the 1989 overthrow of Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu; The Skriker (1994), about a malevolent, fairy-tale creature who preys on two women; and Far Away (2000), about the descent into barbarism in a bleak future world. She continued to probe moral issues in A Number (2002), which asks whether the personality derives more from nature or nurture, genetics or environment.