The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill (review)

Books on Caryl Churchill are like buses. After a long, frustrating period of waiting, three have now been published within the last two years, and indeed, a fourth by Mary Luckhurst, Caryl Churchill, is due out this year. Philip Roberts's About Churchill (Faber and Faber, 2009) and my own Churchill's Socialism (Cambridge Scholars, 2009) are now joined by the much anticipated The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill, a slim volume edited by two of the most significant international scholars in contemporary feminist theatre studies, which, mostly, lives up to expectations.

New in this companion is a decision to treat Churchill's work thematically rather than historically. The editors "refused a linear, chronological charting of Churchill's career" and chose instead to "explore a set of ideas, topics or issues that Churchill revisits in different plays, at different times" (14). This choice allows the reader to see connections not previously made in Churchill scholarship. For example, Sheila Rabillard's powerful discussion of Churchill's ecological drama covers a diverse array of plays spanning 1971 to 2006, including the less well-known radio drama Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen as well as more established plays, such as Fen, Far Away, and Churchill's recent choral work, We Turned on the Light. Instead of reading Churchill's dramaturgical intervention into environmental crises developmentally, Rabillard sees it "as a recursive, intense dialogue in which elements of her earlier plays are repurposed and complex issues are revisited" (88). Similarly, Jean E. Howard explores owning, being owned, capitalist subjectivities, and the destructive nature of capitalism, in plays as varied as Owners, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, and The Skriker.

Other strengths include the successful interweaving of theatre-historical contexts, performance analysis, and textual criticism, which works particularly well in Elaine Aston's chapter, "On Collaboration: 'Not Ordinary, Not Safe.'" Aston takes the "collaborative process as a route through to an understanding of Churchill's theatre" (144) and proposes that the collaborative nature of much of Churchill's work helps to facilitate, for Churchill, a better relationship with the other, which is pertinent to the political and philosophical concerns of her theatre. Dedicating a chapter to other theatrical forms such as dance is also valuable. Libby Worth inevitably struggles to cover five plays in such a short space, but she succeeds in getting across a sense of the complex contribution made by the differently signifying media of dance and music — media, she suggests, "employed to hold open the spaces within a more linear narrative; to interrupt and intrude" (82).

Churchill's philosophical interests are addressed adroitly by R. Darren Gobert, who focuses specifically on performance and selfhood and examines five plays "whose central dramatic impulse is the difficulty of self-knowledge — 'How do I know who I am?'" (105). Gobert discusses such concepts as the philosophy of language, the performance of selfhood, space- time and identity, citationality, and subject formation, and as a counterpoint to Aston's discussion of collaboration, he draws our attention to the noteworthy fact that the plays about individual identity, "Identical Twins, Traps, Icecream, Blue Heart and A Number are all solely authored creations" (121). Mary Luckhurst's chapter, called "On the Challenge of Revolution" is particularly coruscating. In one of the more extended play analyses in the Companion, Luckhurst discusses The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution, a play about the struggle for Algerian liberation featuring the Algerian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The play was published in 1972 but "inexplicably" was never performed (52). Hospital not only gains interest through its positioning alongside Churchill's two famous plays about revolution, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (on the 1640s English Civil War and revolution) and Mad Forest (on the 1990 Romanian revolution), but Luckhurst also brings out vividly the play's contemporary, anti-imperialist relevance.

Janelle Reinelt's "On Feminist and Sexual Politics" provides a helpful interweaving of political and theatrical contexts for a discussion of gender (although not so much of sexuality...