The Plays of Caryl Churchill by Amelia Howe Kritzer (review)

Book Reviews AMEliA HOWE KRTIZER. The Plays of Caryl Churchill. New York: St. Martin's 1991. pp. 217. $39·95· Caryl Churchill is a fa.scinating subject for contemporary critics. A feminist and socialist whose work shows the influence of Brecht, Foucault, and feminist theory, Churchill is likely to spawn scores of dissertations, essays, and book-length studies. Amelia Howe Kritzer's The Plays o[ Caryl Churchill is neither exhaustive nor panicularly original. but it does provide a solid, if limited, introduction to Churchill's work. The structure of the book is somewhat fonnulaic and restrictive. A theoretical introduction , placing Churchill's work in the context of feminist theory and Brechtian dramatic theory and practice, is followed by a series of readings of Churchill's plays to 1990. This means that the book omits consideration of one of Churchill's best and most successful plays, Mad Forest, but incompleteness is the curse of any work on an active, contemporary writer. Plays are grouped in chapters devoted to media (radio plays, television plays), and theme (sex and gender, history, capitalism), but basically Kritzer proceeds in chronological order. She begins her consideration of each play with a summary of the action. This is not always an easy task in Churchill, but the summaries are clear and accurate. Kritzer then discusses each play in tenus of Churchill's interest in feminism, socialism, and her artistic concern with finding a dramatic language appropriate to her topic and her politics. A concluding chapter reiterates Churchill's themes and dramatic devices. The strengths of Ms. Kritzer's readings are their clarity and presentation of the varied processes by which Churchill arrived at her script and the relationship of her dramatic language to her political project. However, the very linear narrative Kritzer imposes on Churchill's dramatic output contradicts her - and her subject's - concern for avoiding such traditional patriarchal narrative structures. In her introductory chapter , for instance. she offers a description of what her book will offer: "Following Catherine Selsey, the analyses will deconstruct the scripts and/or productions of Model'll Drama, 38 (1995) 13! 132 Book Reviews Churchill's plays" (6). Actually, the analyses do nor deconstruct at all (there is no reason why they should, beyond Kritzer's fashionable claim, but I wonder if she knows what deconstruction is). Rather, they place the plays in the most conventional format of critical discussion. One would like to see more sense of continuity in Churchill's work, of the ways in which she elaborated key recurring themes, and, most important, of the ways her plays inform each other. Kritzer talks very little about the actual productions of Churchill's plays. More should be said about Churchill's productive collaboration with Max Stafford-Clark, for instance. Indeed, it is ironic that a feminist like Churchill would collaborate so regularly with male directors when there is such an extraordinary pool of female directors in England (Deborah Warner, Katie Mitchell, Garry Hines, Di Trevis, and Hettie Mac~ Donald come immediately to mind), What bothered me more was the lack of discussion of Churchill's relationship to contemporary playwrights to whose innovations she was alert. Orton is fleetingly men~ tioned a couple of times, but without showing, for instance, how the radio play Lovesick is similar to Orton's What the Butler Saw, written the same year (1967). In the last chapter, Kritzer states: "Although the issues and themes dealt with by Churchill may be encountered in the work of other politically oriented playwrights in contempo~ rary Britain, her use of theatrical form to alter the relationship between play and audi~ eoce sets her work apart" (190). One could argue that Churchill's work is part and parcel of a theatrical project shared by many British theatrical artists in the 1970S and 1980s. The Gay Sweatshop, which is fleetingly mentioned, was one group regularly engaged in the same sort of formal experimentation. Churchill does not write in an artistic vacuum. Like many fine playwrights, she is eclectic as well as original. One interesting aspect of Churchill's work which Kritzer neglects is its relationship to the capitalistic enterprise of theater. I remember seeing Churchill's savage, Jonso~ nian satire...