Churchill Plays: 2: Softcops; Top Girls; Fen; Serious Money (Contemporary Dramatists) - Tapa dura

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 and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert" (Sunday Times); Fen scrutinises the lives of the low-paid women potato pickers of the fens (in Eastern England) and "the playwright pins down her poetic subject matter in dialogue of impressive vigour and economy" (Financial Times) while Serious Money is a satirical study of the effects of the Big Bang - "Pure genius...the first play about the city to capture the authentic atmosphere of the place." (Daily Telegraph)

Born in London, 1938, Churchill had some early acclaim with radio plays like The Ants (1962), not not not not not enough oxygen (1971) and Schreber's Nervous Illness (1972). However, it was through contact with feminism that she developed the language and structures to carry the complexity of her ideas. Top Girls (1982), perhaps Churchill's best play, keenly predicted the rise of bourgeois 'post-feminism' in the Thatcherite 1980s, raising stimulating questions, notably in its tour de force opening where the stories of six women from history overlap, clash and connect over a restaurant meal. Fen (1983) dissected economic and sexual oppressions in the Fenlands; the Foucault-inspired Softcops (1984) considered the meanings of criminality and punishment; and Serious Money (1987) was a witty verse thriller about the City, substantially attended by its objects of attack. Churchill's witty, powerfully intelligent dialogue and her uniquely imaginative sense of structure saw her at the forefront of British playwriting in the 1980s and 1990s.