Abstract
British playwright Caryl Churchill is best known as a socialist feminist playwright who engages with philosophical and theoretical ideas in her plays. Churchill began her career writing radio plays in the 1960s, in the political climate of the Cold War. She was particularly interested in capturing the ambiance of fear and paranoia that was indicative of the Cold War historical moment in the West. With the revival of widespread anxiety during the ‘War on Terror’, Churchill has more recently returned to creating plays that represent globalized conflict and the pervasive threat of terror that such conflicts respond to and breed.
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Notes
- 1.
The opening of the play and its child-friendly form also reminds spectators of Anne-Frank’s diaries in which the Jewish child in hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War Two is forced to make sense of incomprehensible violence and persecution.
- 2.
Martin Crimp’s play Advice to Iraqi Women (2003) employs a similar focus on the rhetoric of parenting to critique the Iraq War.
- 3.
Churchill’s play also prompted a creative response by non-Jewish actor Richard Stirling entitled Seven Other Children: A Theatrical Response to ‘Seven Jewish Children’ (2009) that played for two weeks at the New End Theatre in Hampstead in north-west London. In this work Stirling mimics the form and structure of Churchill’s work but inverts the content by portraying the perspective of Palestinian adults militarizing a male Palestinian child.
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Stevens, L. (2016). Caryl Churchill’s Iraq.doc and Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza . In: Anti-War Theatre After Brecht. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53888-8_6
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