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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 Marxistidentified 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