17 Facts About Caryl Churchill

1.

Caryl Churchill was born on 3 September 1938 in Finsbury, London, the daughter of Jan Brown, a fashion model and actress, and Robert Caryl Churchill, a political cartoonist.

2.

Caryl Churchill returned to England to attend university in 1956, and in 1960 graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, with a BA degree in English Literature.

3.

Caryl Churchill received the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize at Oxford and began her writing career there.

4.

Caryl Churchill wrote television plays for the BBC, including The After-Dinner Joke and Crimes.

5.

Caryl Churchill served as resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre from 1974 to 1975, and was the Royal Court's first female playwright in residence.

6.

Caryl Churchill began collaboration with theatre companies such as the Joint Stock Theatre Company and the Monstrous Regiment Theatre Company.

7.

Caryl Churchill continues to use an improvisational workshop period in developing a number of her plays.

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8.

Caryl Churchill gradually abandoned more conventions of realism, with her loyalty to feminist themes and ideas becoming a guiding principle in her work.

9.

In Top Girls, Caryl Churchill devised a system to indicate how the dialogue should be performed.

10.

Caryl Churchill used the forward dash signal to demonstrate a person interrupting the person speaking.

11.

Caryl Churchill used the asterisk symbol to indicate a speech following on from a speech earlier than the one immediately before it.

12.

Caryl Churchill received an Obie Award in 2005 for this play.

13.

Caryl Churchill's adapted screenplay of A Number was shown on BBC TV in September 2008.

14.

In 2010, Caryl Churchill was commissioned to write the libretto for a new short opera by Orlando Gough, as part of the Royal Opera House's ROH2 OperaShots initiative.

15.

The Sunday Times condemned its "ludicrous and utterly predictable lack of even-handedness"; for The Times, "there are no heroes or villains, for all that Caryl Churchill decries what is happening in Gaza".

16.

Caryl Churchill said: "Anyone can perform it without acquiring the rights, as long as they do a collection for people in Gaza at the end of it".

17.

In November 2019, along with other public figures, Caryl Churchill signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election.