Marlene thinks the eighties are going to be stupendous. Her sister Joyce has her doubts. Her daughter Angie is just frightened. Since its premiere in 1982, Top Girls has become a seminal play of the modern theatre. Set during a period of British politics dominated by the presence of the newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Churchill’s play prompts us to question our notions of women's success and solidarity. Its sharp look at the society and politics of the 1980s is combined with a timeless examination of women's choices and restrictions regarding career and family. This new Student Edition features an introduction by Sophie Bush, Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, UK prepared with the contemporary student in mind.

In this collection of plays from one of our finest dramatists, Caryl Churchill demonstrates her remarkable ability to find new forms to express profound truths about the world we live in. Complete with a new introduction by the author.

Caryl Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, set during the English Civil War, tells the story of the men and women who went into battle for the soul of England. Passionate, moving and provocative, it speaks of the revolution we never had and the legacy it left behind. In the aftermath of the Civil War, England stands at a crossroads. Food shortages, economic instability, and a corrupt political system threaten to plunge the country into darkness and despair. The Parliament men who fought against the tyranny of the King now argue for stability and compromise, but the people are hungry for change. For a brief moment, a group of rebels, preachers, soldiers and dissenters dare to imagine an age of hope, a new Jerusalem in which freedom will be restored to the land. Premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1976, the play was revived at the National Theatre in 1996 and again in 2015, in a production directed by Lyndsey Turner.

From esteemed British playwright Caryl Churchill - a fast moving kaleidoscope - in which more than a hundred characters try to make sense of what they know. Someone sneezes. Someone can't get a signal. Someone shares a secret. Someone won't answer the door. Someone put an elephant on the stairs. Someone's not ready to talk. Someone is her brother's mother. Someone hates irrational numbers. Someone told the police. Someone got a message from the traffic light. Someone's never felt like this before.

A short play about death by Caryl Churchill. A funeral party for a man with an adventurous past and a ginger cat that needs a home. Where is he now? Is his heart lighter than a feather? How did he die? And what happens to his friends? Here We Go premiered at the National Theatre, London, in November 2015.

"I'm walking down the street and there's a door in the fence open and inside there are three women I've seen before." Three old friends and a neighbour. A summer of afternoons in the back yard. Tea and catastrophe. Escaped Alone premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2016, in a production directed by James Macdonald.

A fascinating meditation on human cloning, personal identity and the conflicting claims of nature and nurture. Bernard thought he was an only child. One day he learns the shocking truth: he is just one of a number of clones. Together, he and his father confront epic questions of identity, intimacy and belonging.

Two exhilarating and teasingly entertaining one act plays from one of the UK's leading playwrights.Heart's Desire sees a family awaiting their daughter's return from Australia, though in a series of alternative scenarios, the play collapses as it keeps veering off in unexpected and ridiculous directions.Blue Kettle tells the story of conman Derek and the five women he misleads into believing he is their biological son. Try as he might, Derek's plans are scuppered as the play is invaded by a virus.In Caryl Churchill's ever inventive style, the two plays in Blue Heart pull apart language and structure in a way that is theatrically remarkable and fast paced, in a stirring yet truthful exploration of family and relationships.This edition was published alongside the first major revival of Blue Heart, nearly twenty years after its Royal Court premiere, in a co production by the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, and Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol, in 2016.

A fascinating meditation on human cloning, personal identity and the conflicting claims of nature and nurture. Bernard thought he was an only child. One day he learns the shocking truth: he is just one of a number of clones. Together, he and his father confront epic questions of identity, intimacy and belonging. A Number pushes the boundaries of science and ethics with an astonishing twist on the dynamics of the father/son relationship. It was originally produced at the Royal Court Theatre, London, winning the Evening Standard Award for Best Play. This edition was published alongside a revival by the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton, which subsequently transferred to the Young Vic, London, in 2015, and featured real-life father and son John and Lex Shrapnel.

Caryl Churchill's The Skriker is an extraordinary collision of ancient fairytale and fractured urban England. This edition of the play was published alongside its revival at the 2015 Manchester International Festival. In a broken world, two girls meet an extraordinary creature. The Skriker is a shapeshifter and death portent. She can be an old woman, a child, a young man. She is a faerie come from the Underworld to pursue and entrap them, through time and space, through this world and her own. The Skriker was originally produced at the National Theatre, London, in 1994. It was revived at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 2015, as part of the Manchester International Festival, starring Maxine Peake, directed by Sarah Frankcom and featuring specially commissioned music by Nico Muhly and Antony of Antony and the Johnsons.

Die englische Dramatikerin Caryl Churchill ist die erfolgreichste und experimentierfreudigste Theaterautorin der Welt. Bisherige Deutungen demonstrieren eine Tendenz zu Verwirrtheit und grober Vereinfachung. Stolls offene Interpretationen zeigen das Streben nach menschlicher Selbstverwirklichung als Grundthema aller Werke Churchills auf. Darin erweist sie sich als Feministin. Postmodern ist Churchills Feminismus in der Problematisierung von Selbstverwirklichung, im Aufzeigen der Bruchigkeit konventioneller Normen und der totalen Offenheit beim Experimentieren mit neuen Moglichkeiten."

Included in this volume are Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom, about witchcraft in the seventeenth century; Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, an account of the lives of four young women by Pam Gems; Louise Page's Tissue, about breast cancer; and Aurora Leigh, adapted by Michelene Wandor herself from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel. Each play has an afterword by its author, and the volume opens with an introduction by the editor.

This book of contemporary monologues for women includes pieces from the best of the last three decades of contemporary playwriting, from Caryl Churchill and Michael Frayn to Martin McDonagh and Sarah Kane. Including pieces by award-winning British playwrights, here are pieces both serious and comic providing the actor with all the challenges of performing contemporary plays. The book is an invaluable resource for auditions, acting class, competitions and rehearsals. A fuller appreciation of each monologue is provided by Chrys Salt's invaluable commentaries, giving clues as to possible direction and setting each piece in the context of the play as a whole.Praise for Chrys Salt's Make Acting Work: "A really useful book for every actor to own" Prunella Scales; "This book should be part of every resourceful actor's armoury" Annette Badland

In this volume of the Good Audition Guides, you'll find fifty fantastic speeches for women, all written since the year 2000, by some of our most exciting dramatic voices. Playwrights featured in Contemporary Monologues for Women include Mike Bartlett, Alexi Kaye Campbell, Caryl Churchill, Helen Edmundson, debbie tucker green, Ella Hickson, Lucy Kirkwood, Rona Munro, Joanna Murray-Smith and Enda Walsh, and the plays themselves were premiered at the very best theatres across the UK including the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Bush, Soho and Hampstead Theatres, Manchester Royal Exchange, the Traverse in Edinburgh, the Abbey in Dublin, and many on the stages of the Royal Court. Drawing on her experience as an actor, director and teacher at several leading drama schools, Trilby James prefaces each speech with a thorough introduction including the vital information you need to place the piece in context (the who, what, when, where and why) and suggestions about how to perform the scene to its maximum effect (including the character's objectives and keywords).Contemporary Monologues for Women also features an introduction on the whole process of selecting and preparing your speech, and approaching the audition itself. The result is the most comprehensive and useful contemporary monologue book now available.

This title was first published in 2003. "Jonsonians" explores the theatrical traditions within which Ben Jonson was working, investigates the ways in which his work has influenced and informed the development of theatre from the early 17th century to the present day, and examines Jonson's theatre in relation to 20th- and 21st-century traditions of performance. It argues that although Jonsonian traditions are rarely acknowledged, they are vibrant and powerful forces that are very much alive today in the theatre of writers and directors as diverse as Caryl Churchill, David Mamet, Spike Lee, John Arden, Alan Ayckbourn and Peter Barnes. The book opens with essays on "Poetaster", "Sejanus", "Bartholomew Fair", "The New Inn" and "The Magnetic Lady" - each of which interrogates, in a variety of ways, the notion of "Jonsonian" theatre and considers the relationships of Jonson's theatre to classical traditions, to his contemporaries in England and Europe, and to modern performance practice and theory. The second section of the book includes essays on "The Sons of Ben" (including Richard Brome) Aphra Behn and "Daughters of Ben" (women working in the theatre in the post-Restoration period). The book concludes with an extensive section devoted to modern day Jonsonians, exploring how reading their work as Jonsonian might alter perceptions of contemporary theatre, and how seeing them as contemporary "Jonsonians" might affect our understanding of Jonson's theatre.

Distinguished playwright David Edgar examines the mechanisms and techniques which dramatists throughout the ages have employed to structure their plays and to express their meaning. Written for playwrights and playgoers alike, Edgar's analysis starts with the building blocks of whole plays - plot, character creation, genre and structure - and moves on to scenes and devices. He shows how plays share a common architecture without which the uniqueness of their authors' vision would be invisible. What does King Lear have in common with Cinderella? What does Jaws owe to Ibsen? From Aeschylus to Alan Ayckbourn, from Chekhov to Caryl Churchill, are there common principles by which all plays work? "How Plays Work" is a masterclass for playwrights and playmakers and a fascinating guide to the anatomy of drama.

What might sex be, and what could sex roles be, in the midst of a war between men and women? What is a "woman," a "man," an "androgyne"? Such questions haunt the works Gilbert and Gubar study in Sexchanges, the second volume of their landmark trilogy No Man's Land. Investigating the connections between the feminine and the modern made by writers from Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner, and Kate Chopin to Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Caryl Churchill, they show that the "no man's land" of the Great War became a metaphor for a crisis of masculinity-a crisis that was already associated with the decline of imperialism and the rise of the femme fatale at the fin de siecle, with the newly visible lesbian literary community that was formed in those years and with what many thinkers increasingly understood to be the artifice of gender. Throughout this century, the therefore argue, images of sexchanges-explored in fictions about transvestism and transsexualism-constituted a set of striking tropes through which male and female writers sought to combat one another's conceptions of the relation between anatomy and destiny."[This book] will set the direction of feminist criticism for the nest generation of students and scholars."-Walter Kendrick, New York Times Book Review"For the scholar, it will become an indispensable critical text, but it also will reward the thoughtful general reader with a great deal of insight into this extraordinarily complex century in which we live."-Deirdre Bair, Philadelphia Inquirer"A provocative work, characterized by . . . wit and erudition."-Elyse Blankley, Women's Review of Books

"Scenes of Infidelity: Feminism in the Theatre" is a critical revision of questions in feminist theory of the theatre, based on readings of texts by three writers who in different ways inform and challenge prevalent ideas of feminism as a mode of knowledge and as dramatic strategy: American writers Maria Irene Fornes and Adrienne Kennedy, and the British writer Caryl Churchill. The study also opens up to reflections of a more general nature, pertaining to avant-garde practice, to problems of spectatorship, and to the relationship between politics and aesthetics.