In my last post I introduced Caryll Churchill’s play Blue Heart, now I’m going to talk about this author and some characteristics of her plays, as for this module I’m going to write a play following her style and propose ideas for its direction.

With the reading Caryll Churchill by Mary Luckhurst I learnt more about this writer, for example how politically committed she is and that Brechtian techniques can be related to her work. As Brecht, she is making political statements, but in her case through both the content and form of her plays. This commitment in theatre has normally been linked to Copeau and Lecoq method of acting more than to Stanislavki’s method, as they take the actor to a neutral state instead of making him/her focus on his/her own deep personal retrospective through Stanislavski’s method. As Brecht, they focus more in the physicality of the actor and allow him to move from one state to another easily, showing the audience the political point of the story.

Churchill’s work often includes themes like genocide, sexuality, feminism, capitalism, scientific knowledge, patriarchy, international issues and individual’s relationship to the ideologies in power.

As Luckhurst says in her book ‘Many of her plays deploy alienation devices to express ideological oppression and injustice’, this is one of the examples of how her work can be related to Brechtian techniques. She’s also a dystopian writer, so in general she focuses on big issues and their catastrophic consequences creating complex plays with many tragic elements.

She is known to be one of the best British playwrights and recognized for her innovations in form (as we can see with the glitches in Blue Heart).