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Churchill's Socialism: Political Resistance in The Plays of Caryl Churchill

This article provides a review of the book "Churchill's Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill" by Siân Adiseshiah. The review summarizes that the book argues that Churchill's plays have often been analyzed through a feminist or postmodern lens rather than through her socialist and Marxist influences. It analyzes eight of Churchill's major plays between 1976-2000, demonstrating how her portrayal of political issues evolved over time but remained committed to socialist ideals and utopian visions for social change. The reviewer praises the book for its close analysis of the plays within their historical contexts and for illuminating Churchill's ongoing political engagement through socialism.

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122 views4 pages

Churchill's Socialism: Political Resistance in The Plays of Caryl Churchill

This article provides a review of the book "Churchill's Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill" by Siân Adiseshiah. The review summarizes that the book argues that Churchill's plays have often been analyzed through a feminist or postmodern lens rather than through her socialist and Marxist influences. It analyzes eight of Churchill's major plays between 1976-2000, demonstrating how her portrayal of political issues evolved over time but remained committed to socialist ideals and utopian visions for social change. The reviewer praises the book for its close analysis of the plays within their historical contexts and for illuminating Churchill's ongoing political engagement through socialism.

Uploaded by

Emanuel Almborg
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Churchill's Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl

Churchill
Jenny Spencer

Modern Drama, Volume 53, Number 4, Winter 2010, pp. 583-585 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

For additional information about this article


http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v053/53.4.spencer.html

Access Provided by University of Westminster at 01/24/11 4:20PM GMT


Reviews
SIÂN ADISESHIAH. Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of
Caryl Churchill. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009.
Pp. 261. $59.99 (Hb).

Reviewed by Jenny Spencer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst


Given the current economic realities facing publishers and the anti-canoni-
cal thrust of contemporary research, scholarly, single-author books on con-
temporary 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 ques-
tion 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 con-
versation 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 gen-
eration 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 fem-
inist 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 frame-
work 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

Modern Drama, 53:4 (Winter 2010) doi:10.3138/md.53.4.583 583


REVIEWS

New-Left historiography provides a context for Light Shining in


Buckinghamshire, a Brechtian history play about the dynamics of seven-
teenth-century revolutionary groups. The author’s detailed explication
shows how Churchill constructs political history from written documen-
tation 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 pol-
itical 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 dom-
inance of the free market seemed to bear out Francis Fukuyama’s predic-
tions 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 differ-
ences in style and tone between the two plays, their pairing demonstrates
well the connections between the fall of communism and “unfettered
profit making” at this historical juncture (188). Because Churchill’s
formal experimentation makes the politics of her plays increasingly difficult
to read, Adiseshiah’s historical analysis both here and in the following
chapter is particularly helpful.
The title question of Chapter Six, “Still a Socialist?,” reflects the author’s
belief that discussion of Churchill’s postmodern techniques tends to
obscure the radical political content of her later plays. Here Adiseshiah
imbues the vaguely political sensibility of two dystopian parables, The
Skriker and Far Away, with allegorical significance in relation to the socialist
movement’s shifting political investments during the 1990s: encroaching
environmental disaster, animal cruelty, perpetual warfare, and globalization.
That Churchill’s plays are more politically effective in their use of a de-politi-
cized contemporary idiom may not be entirely persuasive, but the book’s

584 Modern Drama, 53:4 (Winter 2010)


REVIEWS

overall political trajectory has a cumulative effect, making the politics of later
plays easier to discern in the context of earlier discussions. Perhaps the best
answer to the question of Churchill’s socialist commitments can be found
in the book’s afterword, which offers an interesting coda about two recent
plays, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? and Seven Jewish Children: A Play
for Gaza, which directly respond to Britain’s involvement with Bush’s war pol-
icies and with Israel’s bombing of Gaza, respectively.
The strength of Adiseshiah’s book lies in its close textual analysis of plays
between 1976 and 2000 against the backdrop of a judiciously presented social
history. That only eight plays are chosen for discussion is more of a strength
than a weakness: since all are major and frequently taught works, the choice
enables a broader discussion of political ideas and deeper discussion of each
play than might otherwise be possible. For most drama scholars, Churchill’s
ongoing political commitment has never been in doubt; yet the precise
nature of that commitment can be difficult to pin down. Adiseshiah’s care-
fully researched study may help us do just that.

JAMES ALEXANDER. Shaw’s Controversial Socialism. Florida Bernard Shaw


Series. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2009. Pp. xvii þ 292. $69.95 (Hb).

Reviewed by Anna Vaninskaya, University of Cambridge


In 1917, George Bernard Shaw wrote a short variety sketch entitled
Annajanska, The Bolshevik Empress, in which he got the Russian
Revolution spectacularly wrong. This sketch, despite its subject matter,
does not feature in James Alexander’s Shaw’s Controversial Socialism;
perhaps, because it occupies as insignificant a place in Shaw’s oeuvre as
Vera, or the Nihilists does in Oscar Wilde’s; perhaps, because it post-
dates Alexander’s chosen time-frame of 1882 – 1904; but most likely,
because consideration is ruled out by the stringency of Alexander’s adher-
ence to his thesis that there is an “absolute incommensurability between
the plays and the politics” (219). Alexander’s concern is solely with the
latter: although Shaw’s “interest in politics was at least in part . . . dramatic”
(68), “it was in politics, rather than in the drama, that he transcended his
individuality” (5). The characters in the plays were nothing more than
aspects of Shaw, but, in politics, Shaw was himself “an actor, a character,
playing a part” (6). Socialism was “about activity,” the “plays were about
talk” (130), and Alexander dismisses any comparison between the two on
the basis of their insurmountable “difference in form” (219).
It is a distinction the reader has to accept on faith in order to judge the
book on its own terms. Despite the occasional aside on the plays’ “historical

Modern Drama, 53:4 (Winter 2010) 585

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