moderndrama.utpjournals.press Perhaps more than anyone else, Caryl Churchill, with her dramatic oeuvre and its spirit of absurdist revolt, has influenced a generation of playwrights who employ features of the absurd to make feminist arguments on the stage. Suzan-Lori Parks, Anne Washburn, and many of the most prolific absurdist-leaning female playwrights working today credit Churchill with influencing their approach to framing political history and its contemporary legacies (see Anderson; Thompson). That influence is certainly present in the New Feminist Absurd. As Churchill once said, “one of the things the Women’s Movement has done is to show the way the traps work” (qtd. in Aston,
Caryl Churchill 17), and Elaine Aston suggests that Churchill’s absurdist plays changed contemporary theatre by revealing the same thing. The traps (and trappings) of a slew of sociocultural norms (related to gender, sexuality, class, race, age, the body, and domestic and professional labour) are staged in these contemporary plays as spring-loaded vises always threatening to clamp down on female characters. Thus, while Elaine Aston’s recent (2015) attention to Churchill’s animality and her consideration of the human condition within an ecofeminist context doesn’t easily cohere with this study’s plays, her argument about Churchill’s influence does. She writes, “[Churchill’s] critiques of gender […] helped to shape and to define the growing body of feminist writing, in theory, criticism and practice, which constitutes the field now recognized as feminist theatre studies” (Caryl Churchill 19).
The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill In short, Thatcher’s Britain shored up the economic divide of rich and poor, the ‘us and them’ that Churchill wittily and incisively critiqued in Top Girls. ‘Top girl’ Marlene represents an individualistic style of ‘feminism’ (called, at the time, ‘bourgeois feminism’), eager to assert her right to compete as ruthlessly as her fellow male capitalists. If the 1980s were to be a ‘stupendous’ decade, as Marlene predicts, this would obtain only for those in positions of economic privilege – male or female. Moreover, this would be at the cost of less privileged others, female others in particular, as prophesied in the play’s final word/line, spoken by the disadvantaged adolescent, Angie: ‘Frightening’. So, for Churchill, an urgent political theatre question has become how to further our ‘selves’ democratically in the absence of any ideological base from which to challenge the status quo. Given the sustained erosion of a credible, counter-political strategy, Churchill has moved towards what might best be described as strategies of dis-identification with life under intensifying regimes of transnational capitalism.
The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill
