Cloud Nine won the Obie Award in 1982.Ĭhurchill followed this success with Top Girls, a play that portrays women achieving success by imitating the worst of male behaviors. It was also a hit in the United States, where it opened off-Broadway in New York at the Theatre de Lys in May 1981 to positive reviews and large audiences. Another play written for Joint Stock was Cloud Nine, which in 1979 became Churchill’s first big success. The latter play was the result of Churchill’s involvement in London’s experimental Joint Stock Theatre Group. Her two stage plays, Objections to Sex and Violence(1975) and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire(1976), brought her critical attention. During the 1970s, Churchill wrote a number of plays that were broadcast on BBC television, including Turkish Delight(1974) and The After-Dinner Joke(1978). The play premiered in New York the following year. Churchill’s first professional stage production was Owners, performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London in 1972. During this period Churchill continued to write radio plays, including Identical Twins(1968), and to develop a socialist and feminist approach to drama. In 1961, she married David Harter, a barrister, and from 1963 to 1969 the couple had three sons. During her university years, two of her plays received student productions, and in 1962, The Ants, her first professional radio play, was broadcast. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1960. She continued these interests during her undergraduate years, which began in 1957 when she enrolled at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in England. Churchill began to write as a young girl, and she also developed an early interest in the theater. She spent most of her early childhood in and near London before her family moved in 1948 to Montreal, Canada, where Churchill attended the Trafalgar School until 1955. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYĬaryl Churchill was born on September 3, 1938, in London, England. In this act, Churchill explores such topics as women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the sexual revolution, all of which were prominent social movements in Britain, as well as the United States, in the 1970s. Act two takes place in London one hundred years later with mostly the same characters, who have aged only twenty-five years. The first act is set in the nineteenth century in an African country ruled by Britain, and Churchill satirizes the repressive nature of the Victorian family, the rigidity of narrowly prescribed gender roles, and the phenomenon whereby oppressed peoples in colonized countries take on the identity of the colonizers. In addition to frequently being very amusing, the play highlights colonial and gender oppression. It was then performed on tour at the Royal Court Theatre in London and was first staged in New York in 1981.Ĭloud Nine, which can be found in Churchill’s Plays One(London and New York, 1985), was a popular and critical success. Cloud Nine, by British playwright Caryl Churchill, was first performed at Dartington College of Arts in February 1979 by the Joint Stock Theatre Group.
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