Caryl Churchill

Vinegar Tom

Cloud Nine

Far Away

Woman’s role in Churchill’s work

  In this paper we are going to examine the evolution of the playwright Caryl Churchill using three of her plays: Vinegar Tom, Cloud Nine and Far Away.

  Characteristic of Churchill’s work is her enduring commitment to a socialist feminist politics, coupled with a desire to experiment  with a theatrical form: to find a theatrical means of giving expression to her ideas about  a world that, as she presents it, is damaged by the global capitalism.

  In Vinegar Tom, Churchill emphasises her feminism, here the witches were punished because they were women on the edge of society: old, poor, single and sexually unconventional. Churchill uses a language that remarks her feminist theory: Jack:”…You took it from me these three months. I’ve not been a man since. You bewitched me. You took it off me”. (…) Alice: “Susan’s ill, will you leave us alone?” Jack: “Everyone comes near you is ill. Give it back, come on, give it back”. Jack blames Alice for not be a man, and accuses her to be a witch. In other scenes Alice is considered a witch because she has a son and nobody knows who his father is. Also, her mother is accused to be a witch, and at the end of the play they are burnt. In this play, Churchill pretends to inform the audience about the women’s persecution in the seventeenth century, the women are left out and accused to provoke all problems, and these women have to be punished with the death.

We find another way of express her feminism, in “Cloud Nine” on Churchill talks about issues like imperialism, sexuality and gay sexuality, and finally, an epoch when men are dominators and women submissive.

The play begins in the Victorian era with a patriarchal family: Clive, Betty and their children. And just in the beginning Clive says a sexist comment: “This is my family. (…) My wife is all I dreamt a wife should be. And everything she is she owes to me”. And Betty answers as submissive wife: “I live for Clive. The whole aim of my family is to be what he looks for be in a wife. I am a man’s creation as you see, and what men want is what I want to be”. At the second act the story changes, the action take place in modern London and the characters have freedom; for example Betty has left Clive and lives her own life. Churchill presents us two different times and she wants to explain to us the change in both epochs. The first one, a sexist life; and the other one, a life plenty of freedom.

  Finally, “Far Away” is about a girl’s life, Joan. In this play all life forms, human and animal, are in war. At the beginning, Joan is a young girl who lived with his aunt. When she grew up started working in a hat industry with Todd and at the end she crosses a war’s place to meet with her husband. This play recalls us the horrors of the twentieth century holocaust through a woman’s life, the brave Joan. Again, the main character is a woman, following the structure of other Churchill’s plays.

  To conclude, in my point of view, I have realised that Churchill’s work is (usually) influenced by a feminist politics. Churchill fights for give to the audience the knowledge of bad treatment to the women in different centuries and pretends change this inequality.