Caryl Churchill is a playwright much influenced by theatrical past, present, and future. Her work in the 1970s with the emergent Feminist movement produced a collection of plays that are in direct dialogue with the social and political climate of that time (Worthen 842). Similarly, many of her later plays look to the issues of tomorrow; A Number, for example, deals with a range of issues caused by human cloning. Influences from the past are just as pertinent to Churchill’s plays, but are sometimes a bit more obscure. In Cloud Nine, her contemporary and future influences are easy to spot: her participation in workshops on sexual politics at the Joint Stock Theatre Group (directly inspiring Cloud Nine) in 1978-1979, the questions that the play …show more content…
Serving the White colonial economy, Joshua in representation takes on the color of his masters (played by a White man). Each character’s sexual and racial position is marked by appropriate dress and introduced by doggeral verse, including the phrase, repeated by each character, “as you can see.” What we see is what, given sexual and racial politics, cannot be seen. (Diamond 194)
Diamond is arguing that Churchill’s use of cross-gender casting is highly influenced by Brecht’s ideas of presentation vs. representation, that she “rejects the temptations of narrative and exploits the abilities of the live stage to provoke our acknowledgement of the vulnerability and plasticity of human lives” (Keyssar 198). In other words, by re-creating or re-forming the social perception of a character or body, Churchill reveals to us what cannot be seen without that layer of
Notably, one of the principal ideas presented in Glaspell’s work is the concept of gender roles, moreover, the notion of institutional misogyny present in 20th century America. These said ideas are fleshed out through the characters of the play. The play opens with the introduction of five characters: Sheriff Peters, Hale, County Attorney
Hamlet makes use of the idea of theatrical performance through characters presenting themselves falsely to others – from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spying on Hamlet to gain favor with the King, to Hamlet himself playing the part of a madman – and through the play within the play, The Mousetrap. This essay will discuss the ways in which Hamlet explores the idea of theatrical performance, ‘acting’, through analysis of the characters and the ‘roles’ they adopt, specifically that of Hamlet and Claudius. The idea, or the theme of theatrical performance is not an uncommon literary element of Shakespearean works, the most famous of which to encompass this idea being As You Like It. This essay will also briefly explore the ways in which Hamlet reminds its audience of the stark difference between daily life and dramatization of life in the theatre.
As the history of drama progresses, the main characters become more and more common until they could be your next-door neighbors. This normalization of dramatic characters plays a large role in the normalization of dialogue, as shown in Brecht’s 1939 Mother Courage, in which, characters (who are of a lower social standing) do not yet have very individual speech patterns, but speak in the vernacular of the common ma...
When Churchill was two, the family moved to Ireland where Lord Randolph was to work for his father, the Duke of Marlborough. He did not have a very close relationship with his parents, especially his father (Black 42). Churchill recalls at his mother’s death, “She shone for me like the evening star. I loved her dearly — but at a distance” (Dell 627). Much of his time was spent with his nanny, who attempted to teach him math, reading and writing (Black 46). Quite often, Lord Randolph would be off for a political reason while Jennie Jerome enjoyed the social life a young woman might have in this time period. They stayed in...
Poetry and Drama. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 9nd ed. New York: Longman, 2005. Pgs 389-392
Theatre Journal 37.4 (1985): 426-439. Print. Wheeler, Kip. " Literary Terms and Definitions M." Literary Terms and Definitions "M" Carson-Newman University, n.d. Web. 12 May 2014.
Kelly, John. ENGLISH 2308E: American Literature Notes. London, ON: University of Western. Fall 2013. Lecture Notes.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1c. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print. The.
Caryl Churchill’s play Far Away and Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission are two plays that both concern violent, corrupt political systems, but each playwright goes about confronting these issues in a quite different style. Jane Taylor structures her work with an omniscient perspective that allows the audience to see the reality of what is happening at all times, while Churchill utilizes a limited perspective that leaves the audience as unaware of the truth as her characters. These approaches result in two plays that are very different in character, but at the same time, both of the works successfully create a similar uneasy, frightening atmosphere that is effective in impressing upon the audience the dangers and injustices of such violent governments
Rose, Mark. “Reforming the Role.” Modern Critical Interpretations: Hamlet. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Rpt. from Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions. Ed. Michael Seidel and Edward Mendelson. N.p.: Yale University Press, 1977.
Gainor, J. Ellen., Stanton B. Garner, and Martin Puchner. The Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter Edition. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Kelly, John. ENGLISH 2308E: American Literature Notes. London, ON: University of Western. Fall 2014. Lecture Notes.
113- The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. of the book. Vol.
Kernodle, George R. "The Theater Of Exaltation: Modern Tragedy And Poetic Drama." Kernodle, George R. Invitation to the Theatre. New Yory: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967. 217-223.
In 1979, Caryl Churchill wrote a feminist play entitled Cloud Nine. It was the result of a workshop for the Joint Stock Theatre Group and was intended to be about sexual politics. Within the writing she included a myriad of different themes ranging from homosexuality and homophobia to female objectification and oppression. “Churchill clearly intended to raise questions of gender, sexual orientation, and race as ideological issues; she accomplished this largely by cross-dressing and role-doubling the actors, thereby alienating them from the characters they play.” (Worthen, 807) The play takes part in two acts; in the first we see Clive, his family, friends, and servants in a Victorian British Colony in Africa; the second act takes place in 1979 London, but only twenty-five years have passed for the family. The choice to contrast the Victorian and Modern era becomes vitally important when analyzing this text from a materialist feminist view; materialist feminism relies heavily on history. Cloud Nine is a materialist feminist play; within it one can find examples that support all the tenets of materialist feminism as outlined in the Feminism handout (Bryant-Bertail, 1).