Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest: Polyphonic Representations of Southeastern Europe

Abstract

Caryl Churchill has often been designated a socialist feminist in her work as a playwright, and associated with a theoretical perspective which, in Michelene Wandor's words, "aims to analyse and understand the way in which power relations based on class interact with power relations based on gender." Her dramaturgical approach to themes involving women and patriarchy has been distinctively different from that of many of her male peers of socialist persuasion in the British theatre of the past two decades. She uses fragmented, open-ended dramatic structures, and an approach to characterization which is often the result of extensive field-work, workshops and improvisations carried out with her actors before she begins writing her plays. This workshop approach, which frequently dispenses with linear "master narrative" forms altogether, was first developed with the feminist theatre group Monstrous Regiment — with whom she wrote Vinegar Tom (1976), a play about witch-hunts in seventeenth-century England — and extended with Joint Stock, and the director Max Stafford-Clark, in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976), Cloud Nine (1979), Top Girls (1982), Fen (1983), and Serious Money (1987).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.