As Caryl Churchill turns 70, her admirers and collaborators tell what it's like to work with one of our most important playwrights
Is Caryl Churchill the greatest female playwright of our time? Of any time? Back in the 1980s, when she used to give press interviews, she would have slapped your wrists for asking such a sexist, reductive question. And did, whenever it was put to her.
It's her uncanny ability to pull you up, flip you over, rewire your cosy assumptions that makes Churchill such an irreducible writer. On Wednesday she turns 70. And, to mark that birthday, this month the Royal Court will stage readings of her plays. They demonstrate a mastery of her medium. From her first full-length effort, Owners, in 1972, and in the 23 that followed, she has played dazzling games with form: centuries, genders and races collide on her increasingly surreal stage. Her works betray an unrelenting political inquiry, into feminism (Top Girls, 1982), capitalism (Serious Money, 1987), colonialism (Cloud Nine, 1979) or cloning (A Number, 2002).
She remains purposely enigmatic. We know that she was born in London but her family moved to Montreal, where she lived from 1948-55. She then read English at Oxford, produced three plays, and, on graduating, began writing radio plays for the BBC. In 1961 she married the lawyer David Harter, with whom she now lives in Islington, and has three sons. But she is no recluse: she always gets involved in the rehearsals of her new plays: indeed, many were developed during rehearsals. Here, her peers and colleagues describe one of our greatest living playwrights.
Daniel Craig, actor, A Number, 2002
She's a dreadful flirt. She just flirts all the time. I think she could be intimidating if she wanted to be, this weighty intellectual, but she's just great fun to have around. With A Number, cloning was a subject that deeply affected her, it just came gushing out of her. She was there all through the rehearsal process and she loves being there, in the thick of it, trying to make sense of it all. With most of Caryl's stuff, you read it and go: “What the f*** is that about?” But it's how you say it, not how you read it, that's important. And once you start performing it, the message is always very clear. When we'd meet up in the bar afterwards, we didn't go over the play, we'd go over the world. It's not that she's looking to discover the next new thing to write about, it's that she fully understands what's already happening.
Sir David Hare, playwright
The principal question you can ask of any artist is: what difference would it have made if they'd never existed? Would the culture be poorer? In Caryl's case, the answer is self-evident. She is that rare radical in whom nothing is vulgar: she never flattens her art out of a need to advance what she urgently has to say.
Sir Richard Eyre, director
What's so unusual about her is the combination of a sense of genuine mystery about human behaviour and motivation, allied to this very fierce, analytical intelligence. That's the paradox of Caryl Churchill. She is sui generis.
Lindsay Duncan, actor, Top Girls, 1982
Caryl's a grandmother now, and enjoys it so much: when we bump into each other we're more likely to talk about family than anything else. It's not just political dogma.
I first met her on Top Girls. I'd never been involved in anything like it. There we were at the Royal Court, all of us women, asking all these questions of ourselves and the world. It was quite a heady time. I remember being so taken with her, this tall, striking, rather elegant but selfeffacing woman. I don't mean that she denied herself in any way, but she was one of the team, very open, she didn't intimidate or in any way make us feel that we weren't capable of doing it right. She wears her intelligence so lightly and brings the most delightful merriment into the rehearsal room. I remember feeling, this is what it's like to work with a woman. I decided then that I only ever wanted to work in that way. Not to play a part in something, but to be a part of something.
Max Stafford-Clark, director
She had this sort of surreal, slightly elusive sense about her. I worked with Caryl on Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Cloud Nine, Top Girls and Serious Money. She's a very vivid person and a very kind one. Working collaboratively is often quite difficult, but with Caryl it was easy. As a socialist liberal feminist humanist she's absolutely committed to collaboration. She'd always be the first person who'd say: “You could cut those five lines. You really don't need those.” And I'd think: “Yes, I'd have realised that three days hence.”
She got a double first from Oxford, so you know you are in the presence of one of those people who is far cleverer than you'll ever be. But also she has an incredible theatrical imagination, which has nothing to do with intelligence. At the same time, her political intuition is always foremost. She is remarkable: completely new, every time she comes out of the box.
Polly Stenham, playwright
She was a big inspiration to me in terms of writing. I first came across her when they did Top Girls at school. I was about 14, and I thought: “What the f***'s this? This is brilliant.” That bit with the period and the finger, we were just sitting there gawping, going: “God, I can't believe you can do this.” I think that was my first introduction to how far you could go.
One of my favourite plays ever is Far Away [2000], which is mad and perfect and tiny and nasty and brilliant. When she came to talk to the Royal Court writers, she was very gentle and shy, incredibly graceful, with this deeply intelligent face. She's amazing and incredibly important.
Nicholas Wright, playwright and director
I directed Owners, which I think was Caryl's first full-length play, in 1972. It was immediately obvious that she was unique. Her touch as a playwright is very smart and sparkling but it always suggests that there's something more anxious and dark going on underneath.
Politically, she's very upfront. She'll tell you exactly what she thinks and is very honest and uncompromising. She's not at all good at wasting time. There's this determined practicality to her.
Harriet Walter, actor, Cloud Nine
I met Caryl in 1980 doing Three More Sleepless Nights and Cloud Nine. She could be this daft, giggly 12-year-old, joining in our rehearsal games. She'd listen and watch like a curious child, but then come up with a brilliantly intelligent play, and so funny! Blue Heart [1997] had me helplessly giggling.
I think Caryl's particular skill in working through workshops while maintaining her individual inventiveness helped to feminise theatre in some way. She won't write anything that she doesn't want to write; she won't write at all if she's not in the mood. She is not in the least concerned with keeping trendy. She is so completely her own person, her own writer.
- Caryl Churchill Readings are at the Royal Court, SW1 (020-7565 5000), Sept 16-26. www.royalcourttheatre.com
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