Born in 1938 in London, Churchill grew up between world wars and developed her political consciousness and activist outlook at a young age. She began her career as a playwright during her university years at Oxford, graduating in 1957. Over the 1960s and early 1970s, as she raised her family, she transitioned to writing radio and television dramas for the BBC, but was quick to return to theatre. After the first professional production of her work (Owners in 1972), she worked as the Royal Court’s resident dramatist and developed some of her plays in workshop with Joint Stock Theatre Company (with which she developed Cloud 9) and the feminist theatre collective Monstrous Regiment.
Cloud 9’s premiere in 1979 announced Churchill’s arrival as a daring and daringly innovative playwright; the US production earned an OBIE award for Best New Play in 1981. Churchill followed Cloud 9 with a string of critically successful and risk-taking works: 1982’s Top Girls (another OBIE winner), which brings together the so-called “top girls” across generations and cultures for a time-and-space-defying dinner party; 1983’s Fen, which looks at the effects of decades of economic deprivation on a modern farming village, was created with Joint Stock and received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize; and 1987’s Serious Money, which scored a hat trick on the awards circuit, receiving the Evening Standard Award, OBIE Award, and another Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
In Churchill’s plays, there is a constant search for new kinds of language and theatrical structures: devices that can reveal the essence of a moment.” Coming off her award-winning period in the 1980s, Churchill took her already-experimental work and exposed it to new methods of fragmentation, using myth against itself—in such plays as 1990’s Mad Forest about the barely-passed Romanian revolution and particularly 1994’s The Skriker, in which a shape-shifting fairy manipulates humans through words and fractured incantations—to challenge expectations of narrative.
The OBIE committee awarded Churchill a Sustained Excellence Award in 2001, but Churchill was only mid-career. Her subsequent work deepened her commitment to examining controversial, contemporary issues. Indeed, in the decade after she received the Obie, she dove into: the ethics of human cloning (2002’s A Number); America’s post-Vietnam War geopolitical entanglements (2006’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?); the Gaza War between the Gaza Strip and Israel (2009’s Seven Jewish Children – a play for Gaza; arguably her most polarizing work); as well as further experiments in form (2012’s Love and Information, a collage of unordered, purposefully oblique sequences). In the past few years, her work has focused on the ugliness of intimacy, as seen in Here We Go (2015)’s seniors confronting their mortality with confusion and disjunction and the now-chillingly familiar scene of Escaped Alone (2016), in which domestic terror is as everyday and ordinary as your backyard. This, for Churchill, is perhaps what one definition of sustained excellence may be: the rigorous exploration of questions that we either don’t want or know how to ask.