How does Caryl Churchill affect the acting and production process through her script writing

How does Caryl Churchill affect the acting and production process through her script writing

Caryl Churchill has furthered feminist performance theory, in the last twenty years,

and broadened traditional views of gender roles through her script writing. For

example, her plays Cloud Nine and Top Girls defy traditional convention, with Cloud

Nine’s cross-gender casting and Top Girl’s pro-Thatcherite ethos as its foundation.

Churchill has affected the acting and production process in the way she has written

her scripts, such as the mentioned pieces, and the way in which theatre is performed.

“Her work is heavily influenced by the practices of experimental

and physical theatre: not one to make it easy for an audience, she

prefers to tell a tale in a challenging, sometimes meandering way.”

The language in Far Away appears very normal within the context of the piece,

though the subject of the book is something that most audiences would either not

understand or be disgusted by.

“… and in fact I killed two cats and a child under five so it

wasn’t that different from a mission.” – Joan

Churchill’s script, for Far Away, can be seen to turn our present day society into a

collection of barbarous individuals, sparing no exception to the animal kingdom and

Mother Nature. One could see this as Churchill’s own portrayal of the War of the Worlds. Joan shows concern regarding where the loyalties of the nearby river lies.

This could be seen as quite an absurd gesture, however falls into place within the

context of the piece and the society in which the characters are living in. Everything

on planet Earth is at war with one another. Churchill’s post modern script can be seen

to affect the acting and production process by the way in which it transforms the

actors into characters, that are unrelated to present day society, who far more in touch

with their primordial instinct of ‘survival of the fittest’ in this unimaginable war.

“I’ve shot cattle and children in Ethiopia. I’ve gassed mixed troops

of Spanish, computer programmers and dogs. I’ve torn starlings apart with

my bare hands… I could go on all day doing that, it was better than sex.”

- Todd.

The characters within Churchill’s script appear almost quite normal at the

beginning, in regards to the very start of the play where the initial convers...

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...whereby at the end of the play Selby is in a managerial position.

Though this was done in a more light-hearted spirit without the solemn tones that

hang about Top Girls. This can be seen to be the way in which Churchill’s attention to

current affairs in plays such as Top Girls and After Dinner Joke have affected the

acting and production process.

Caryl Churchill can be seen to have affected the acting and production process of

today’s theatre in many different ways through her script writing. The ‘chilling

vision’ of the future in Far Away pushes the actors into a new world, a new approach

to their character studies. Top Girls, a reflection of Thatcherite Britain in the late

seventies and eighties, takes the actors back to a milestone for the women population

of Britain. After Dinner Joke, another reflection of the fight for Third World

awareness and the fight against poverty and famine in the late seventies that would

lead to such projects as Band Aid. This paper has seen how these particular scripts

have affected the acting process, by pushing actors to achieve new feats, and the

production process, by the way in which a play is staged and cast.