Short Reviews

Caryl Churchill’s body of work is prodigious. From 1958 to 2015, she has written nearly fifty plays for the stage, radio, and television, not including her unpublished or unproduced scripts. Despite her popularity, it’s unlikely many people know the entirety of her work, and even those who do will know it better and more deeply by reading Gobert’s excellent study. Ambitious and accessible, the book will be valuable for any course on Churchill, or for anyone interested in the playwright’s work.

While several books on Churchill already exist, Gobert’s innovative approach makes this one a welcome addition. Taking its cue from Churchill’s own experimentalism, its form is deliberately varied and eschews chronology. Chapters one through five look at Churchill’s plays from five distinct vantage points, using a range of methodological approaches. In every chapter, Gobert relies on three plays from different decades as primary examples, deftly folding in development and production histories and significant scholarly criticism on the plays. One chapter, for example, demonstrates how Churchill fits form to content in Top Girls, The Skriker, and Far Away, while another examines the ontology of performance in Traps, Blue Heart, and Love and Information.

The analysis is consistently cogent and original. Even plays that have been written about many times over—e.g., Top Girls, Cloud Nine—are given new and compelling readings here. While aspects of Churchill’s recent, more radically undefined texts remain confounding, Gobert nevertheless makes a persuasive case for a combination of metatheatricality and oblique politics in these plays, such that Love and Information (2012), for example, with its more than 1,000 unassigned lines grouped in seven sections, “positions its audience as performers, tasked—just as actors are—with making meaning from indeterminate data.”

At the same time that Gobert offers close readings of three central texts and their productions, he seamlessly incorporates and analyzes at least fifty of Churchill’s other scripts, many unfinished or unproduced. This allows him to illustrate the evolution of her work, and how she has revised, recycled, or refined ideas, characters, lines, and scenes to different ends in different dramas. Approaching Churchill’s career through Gobert’s five overlapping points of entry is like crisscrossing a landscape: what emerges is a necessarily incomplete but illuminating, complex, and expansive picture of the terrain. The occasional re-treading, or the recurrence of several plays, productions, and critical figures in Churchill’s working history, only enlarges our understanding of them.

Throughout, Gobert attends equally to Churchill’s politics and aesthetics. That he does this without ever losing sight of productions and theatricality is particularly refreshing. He draws extensively on production archives, perhaps never more than when addressing the interrelated issues of ownership, money, and collaboration, the principal subjects of chapters two and four. To demonstrate how the plays “model an ethics of social cooperation,” he describes, for example, the treatment of the original London cast of Fen, a play that directly addresses labor economy. The Joint Stock Company actors who had helped devise the play with Churchill were not allowed to perform it in New York because of union regulations, but they continued to be paid at her request, even when the production went to the U.S. without them. Here, and in his argument about the anti-capitalist Serious Money especially, Gobert is adept at parsing how money and the complicated ethics of who’s accountable or beholden to whom in the professional theatre play out in Churchill’s work and career.

The final chapter is comprised of two essays, one by Elaine Aston, who places Churchill in London’s theatre scene over the past fifty years, and one by Siân Adiseshiah, who looks at Churchill’s work in the political context of the rise and fall of the Left in Britain. The essays provide insights about the ways Churchill’s plays are imbricated in their specific times, and the inclusion of other authors reflects the polyvocality of Churchill’s work, as Gobert points out, but still the essays feel slightly shoe...