In The Theatre of Caryl Churchill, R. Darren Gobert strings together connections between Churchill's works, enabling readers—whether Churchill novices or authorities—to understand the playwright's corpus as a whole and as a product of Churchill's politics. Until now, critical treatment of Churchill's work has been cursory and focused almost exclusively on her most well-known pieces, such as Top Girls and Cloud Nine. Gobert, a specialist in comparative drama, provides a much more expansive analysis, exploring three of Churchill's plays in each chapter while also drawing from a range of pieces, highlighting how they are integral to her body of work and, more important, to theatre.
Mirroring Churchill's distinctive approach to dramatic writing with its tendency to change and adapt, Gobert's account of her work is organized thematically according to Churchill's civic proclivities. His first chapter, appropriately entitled “Churchill's Landscapes,” considers Churchill's adeptness at modifying the form of her plays to match the subject matter. As Gobert notes, Churchill views her medium, “as a fluid vehicle for unbound expression rather than an agglomerate of genres and conventions” (1). Beginning with how Churchill directs the audience's attention to particular conflicts by the order of scenes in Top Girls, moving to how the abstractness of The Skriker allows the audience to free-associate, and ending with the “spare aesthetic” of Far Away that reinforces acknowledgment of covert evil going on unseen, Gobert argues that a major strength of Churchill's writing is her flexibility of form (37).
Churchill's preoccupation with capitalism and ownership is taken up in Gobert's second chapter. He uncovers how Churchill's collaborations were intentional moments of opposition toward patriarchy and the status quo of private and public property. In other words, Churchill broke the rule that specific property—such as that of a play—should have either a single owner (i.e., the playwright or the publisher) or should be owned by everyone. Her collaborations allowed that ownership to be both. The first of the three plays analyzed in this chapter is Owners, which is about the false privilege gained through buyers' financial acquisition of property, which inevitably leads to hostility. Churchill extends the commentary about the evil of gain further by making explicit that rampant capitalism (such as that depicted in Serious Money: A City Comedy) is also pervasive in the theatre. A Dream Play continues in this metatheatrical mode, being a translation of a Strindberg play and yet owned by Churchill.
Chapter 3 takes on Churchill's deep concerns about the body and identity. Gobert frames this chapter with analysis of Churchill's radio play Identical Twins, in which one actor plays two twin brothers. The absence of visible bodies due to the medium of radio throws into relief the importance of what you don't see and how bodies are marked by their various social and ideological contexts. This phenomenon is further explored in Churchill's Cloud Nine with its cross-body casting (a male child is played by an adult female, a black man is played by a white actor, one character is played by a doll, etc.). Furthermore, Icecream and A Number emphasize how their characters allow more than surface associations with stereotypes: namely, the characters, through performance, divulge particular deep-rooted personal ideologies that reveal how identity is affected by commodification.
Turning in Chapter 4 to Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Fen, and Mad Forest, Gobert examines Churchill's propensity for collaboration and the political ramifications of such practice, likening her approach to that of Brecht. Gobert explains that, “[b]y linking the world of the play with the world of its production, Churchill … offers challenges and rebukes to the politics of the world off stage, suggesting different models for social cooperation” (123–4). Each of the three plays in this chapter depicts political resistance: the English civil war (Light Shining in Buckinghamshire), the development of England's agricultural fenlands (Fen), and the Romanian revolution (Mad Forest). All of these plays developed in workshops, with Churchill's dramaturgical initiatives leading the effort. The workshops highlight not only Churchill's desire for collaboration, but also the generative environment she wished to establish by immersing herself and her collaborators into a given historical and politically charged moment.
Gobert's final chapter explores the ontology of performance by looking at how Churchill's plays live in their performance and not on the page. Traps depicts a group of adults whose romantic entanglements change often and fluidly—even from production to production—representing a many-worlds reality; Blue Heart, a combination of two one-acts, offers repetition of scenes and substitution of words in order to make the viewer ever aware of the genre being witnessed; and Love and Information abandons character lists and plot entirely in exchange for words that must be given shape only by those chosen to perform them. Two essays about Churchill by Elaine Aston and Siân Adiseshiah make up the final section of the book. Aston places Churchill's work in the historical context of London's theatre milieu, looking specifically at the past fifty years. Adiseshiah situates Churchill within the leftist politics of England, with which she aligns herself.
Gobert's book provides a useful and dynamic account of Churchill as a playwright, feminist, and political crusader. Her body of work is given its due, as each chapter does justice to her plays—both the renowned and the unpublished. Celebrating Churchill's radical form and approaches, Gobert demonstrates how her work “opens up into an uncharted space of possibility, daring its audiences to find their own models ‘of what they could be like’” (19).
