Caryl Churchill: 28 books

An innovative theatre piece combining music, voices and dance, with a text by Caryl Churchill and music by Orlando Gough. Hotel is in two parts: In the first, Eight Rooms, fourteen people - tourists, couples and business people - spend an ordinary night in a hotel. But they all occupy...

A man falls in love with America and leaves his wife and children for fifty years of love and adventure with Sam. 'startling... Having dealt in the past with the politics of sex, Churchill puts the sexuality of politics centre stage' - Guardian 'radiates quiet fury... Churchill's focus...

A stunningly ambitious work from one of the UK's most influential playwrights. Someone sneezes. Someone can't get a signal. Someone shares a secret. Someone won't answer the door. Someone put an elephant on the stairs. Someone's not ready to talk. Someone is her brother's mother. Someone hates...

Softcops renders the philosophy of Foucault as a music-hall turn and Victorian freakshow "theatre and history combine to give such intelligent fun" (TLS); Top Girls brings five great and less-than-great women from history together for a dinner party and "has a combination of directness...

Three short plays by one of the most inventive dramatists working today, each written in response to political events. War and Peace Gaza Piece (2014) draws on Tolstoy’s novel and accounts of family life in Gaza. Tickets are Now On Sale (2015) explores the relationship between sponsorship...

A brilliant and unsettling play from one of the UK's leading dramatists. Premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2000. At the opening of the play, a young girl is questioning her aunt about having seen her uncle hitting people with an iron bar; by the end, several years later, the whole world...

A short play by one of the UK's leading dramatists. Premiered at the Royal Court in October 2012. 'No one could blame me. I've been hurt. You're a monster.' A child is shut in her room, a dog is dead in the road, someone is kissing her brother in law. A family locked in hatred is sending...

Marlene hosts a dinner party in a London restaurant to celebrate her promotion to managing director of 'Top Girls' employment agency. Her guests are five women from the past: Isabella Bird (1831- 1904) - the adventurous traveller; Lady Nijo (b1258) - the mediaeval courtesan who became a Buddhist nun...

A series of surreal sketches, each prefaced by a doom-laden tabloid style headline, This Is A Chair is at once modern and postmodern, tragedy and farce, about all and about nothing. 'Churchill, who constantly reinvents dramatic form, has come up with something compelling and strange: an intimate...

Lives of the Great Poisoners tells the stories of famous killers from Medea to Dr Crippen - using dance, song and spoken dialogue. An incredibly rich and vibrant dramatic experience from the artistic partnership - Churchill and Gough - behind the acclaimed Hotel. Music by Orlando Gough. Lives of the Great Poisoners was first performed at the Arnolfini in Bristo in 1991.

Marlene thinks the eighties are going to be stupendous. Her sister Joyce has her doubts. Her daughter Angie is just frightened. Since its premiere in 1982, Top Girls has become a seminal play of the modern theatre. Set during a period of British politics dominated by the presence of the newly...

A landmark play about sexual politics in colonial Africa and modern-day Britain, in which all our assumptions about sex and gender are stunningly exploded. First staged by Joint Stock and premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 1979, it has since been staged all over the world. Set...

An extraordinary play combining English folk tales with modern urban life in a physically and verbally stunning creation. The Skriker of English legend is 'a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged'. In the play we follow in its search for love and revenge, as it pursues two young...

An unsettling look at British attitudes to America and vice versa, from one of our leading dramatists. 'The idea of Oregon, the word, just the word Oregon really thrills me'. 'You can't help loving England. The green fields. The accents. The pubs.' Set half in the UK and half in the...