The Common Imagination and the Individual Voice

Abstract

Caryl Churchill began her playwriting career for radio in the ‘sixties’, became a writer for live theatre in association with such companies as Monstrous Regiment and, notably. Joint Stock – and recently achieved her greatest commercial success with the transfer to Wyndhams Theatre of her play about the City. Serious Money, premiered at the Royal Court in March 1987 in a production by Max Stafford-Clark. In conversation here with Geraldine Cousin, she sketches in the early years of her career and the different demands of radio and stage plays, discusses some of her recurrent themes and preoccupations, weighs how far she feels herself a ‘woman writer’, and describes the collaborative approach of working with Joint Stock. She then talks in more detail not only about Serious Money, but her earlier collaboration with David Lan (author of Flight. Sergeant Ola and His Followers, and The Winter Dancers) – a variation upon the Bacchae theme, A Mouthful of Birds, directed by Les Waters and lan Spink. The interviewer, Geraldine Cousin, teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.