Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T15:28:13.346Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - On Caryl Churchill’s ecological drama: right to poison the wasps?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2010

Elaine Aston
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Elin Diamond
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Get access

Summary

Caryl Churchill's drama shows a sustained and deepening engagement with ecological issues from her 1971 radio drama Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen, through Fen (1983) (developed for the stage with the members of the Joint Stock theatre company), to the collaborative combination of dance, song and drama Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991), the more recent plays The Skriker (1994) and Far Away (2000), and her 2006 choral work We Turned on the Light. Her focus moves from localized environmental concerns (as in Fen) to the ecological effects of globalization and the alienated consumerism of late capitalism (for example, in Far Away and The Skriker), but there is not so much a simple progression in her work as a recursive, intense dialogue in which elements of her earlier plays are repurposed and complex issues are revisited. In particular, Churchill returns to the idea of the commons - which can be understood both as a localized place, a plot of land unenclosed and of equal access, and also as a planetary concept of shared resources, where the nature of the sharing (perhaps beyond the human?) is open to philosophical inquiry. Churchill works with time as well as place in her ecological dramaturgy, deploying temporal shifts which hint at the multiple rhythms of biology and of capitalist exchange, exploring conceptual legacies of the past which inform current understanding of our relationship to the natural world, and historicizing in the Brechtian sense as she shows paths not taken.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×