Churchill's Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (review)

Given the current economic realities facing publishers and the anti-canonical thrust of contemporary research, scholarly, single-author books on contemporary playwrights are increasingly rare. Siân Adiseshiah's book on Caryl Churchill is a welcome exception. The author argues that drama scholars have focused to a fault on Churchill's feminist themes, stylistic innovations, and postmodern inclinations, leaving behind the Marxist and socialist frameworks that might better explain both the plays in question and their overall trajectory. In a compelling reading of eight major Churchill plays, Adiseshiah establishes a continuous line of political engagement that shifts over time but ultimately remains faithful to both its socialist provenance and utopian tendencies.

The opening chapter, "Socialist Contexts," puts Churchill's plays in conversation with British Left debates from the 1970s through the 1990s, tracing how artistic debates on the Left developed in their encounter with feminist and ecological concerns, Thatcherite monetarism, and the fall of communism. This context provides a useful background for an entire generation of politically committed British playwrights. Unlike more Marxist-identified playwrights like John Arden, Trevor Griffiths, Edward Bond, and David Hare, however, Churchill is usually discussed primarily as a feminist and avant-garde playwright. But in chapter two, Adiseshiah burnishes Churchill's socialist credentials in light of "The Politics of Utopia." The author traces utopian discourses of the early twentieth century to their 1990s revival in work inspired by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. From this admittedly amorphous tradition, at odds with the more critical thrust of traditional Marxism as well as with the dystopian temperament of much twentieth-century literature, the author constructs a useful framework for tracing the dynamic interaction between utopian desire and social critique in the plays covered here: Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Mad Forest, The Skriker, and Far Away.

In subsequent chapters, Churchill's plays are taken up in pairs, with readings enriched by comparison. In chapter three, the politics of New-Left historiography provides a context for Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, a Brechtian history play about the dynamics of seventeenth-century revolutionary groups. The author's detailed explication shows how Churchill constructs political history from written documentation in ways that open up the material to contemporary issues. Vinegar Tom extends the witch-hunting theme, turning from the persecution of known seventeenth-century radicals to the marginalized population of seventeenth-century women. Staged without a specific time or location, the play constructs a feminist history with pointed references to the present. In both plays, Churchill contests the marginalizing tendencies of traditional historians without idealizing the past she seeks to recover. A history play that looks closely at issues of gender and class, including women's complicity in their own oppression, Vinegar Tom provides a perfect segue to chapter four's discussion of Top Girls and Fen. Here, Adiseshiah takes up the politics of motherhood as it affects the plays' female characters, the practices and identities of women as workers both inside and outside the domestic sphere, and "the implications of engaging with women as a unified class" (133).

Although the rationale for excluding particular plays (such as Cloud Nine) for analysis is not stated, each pair of plays reflects issues facing political activists at the time. Chapter five, titled "The Triumph of Capitalism? Serious Money and Mad Forest," covers the time period just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when, according to Adiseshiah, the dominance of the free market seemed to bear out Francis Fukuyama's predictions about "the end of history" (172). In Mad Forest, Churchill looks at the quiet effects on everyday life of the overthrow of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu; in Serious Money, Churchill updates the city comedy form in an iambic-pentameter send-up of capitalistic greed. Despite differences in style and tone between the two plays, their pairing demonstrates well the connections between the fall of communism...